EmpCo Directive: checking green claims

What the directive changes

Directive (EU) 2024/825, known as EmpCo for "Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition", amends the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive. Member states had to transpose it by 27 March 2026, and it has applied since 27 September 2026. In Germany it is transposed through the Act against Unfair Competition (UWG).

At its core, it shifts the burden of proof. Until now, an environmental claim was permissible as long as it was not demonstrably misleading. Now certain claims are prohibited outright, and others are only permitted with evidence. The most important changes:

Generic environmental claims such as "environmentally friendly", "green" or "ecological" are prohibited if the company cannot demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance, for example through the EU Ecolabel. They are on the blacklist in Annex I of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, so they are prohibited without any case-by-case assessment.
Neutrality through offsetting: claiming that a product is climate neutral or has reduced emissions because emissions are offset through certificates is prohibited.
The part for the whole: a claim about the entire product or the whole company is prohibited if it only concerns one aspect.
Own labels: sustainability labels that are not based on a certification scheme or established by a public authority are prohibited.
Legal requirements presented as an advantage: advertising something that is required by law anyway is an unfair practice.
Future promises such as "climate neutral by 2035" are only permissible under the new Article 6(2) of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive with a publicly available, realistic implementation plan with measurable interim targets, which an independent expert reviews regularly.

Text is not the only thing that counts as an environmental claim. The definition expressly includes images, graphics, symbols, labels and brand, company and product names. The green leaf next to the product photo and the "EcoLine" product line belong in the check just as much as the body text.

Does this also affect B2B companies?

The directive protects consumers. Purely B2B communication, such as a quotation to a buyer, does not fall directly under the new prohibitions. In practice, this is of little help. Websites, data sheets and press releases are public and also reach consumers, and many industrial products are also sold to end customers through dealers or shops. And the German Act against Unfair Competition also prohibits misleading advertising towards businesses; competitors and associations can issue formal warnings.

The German Federal Court of Justice had already set the direction before the directive: on 27 June 2024 (case no. I ZR 98/23, the Katjes case) it ruled that advertising with the ambiguous term "climate neutral" is only permissible if its meaning is explained in the advertisement itself. A reference to a website was not sufficient. So anyone checking their text inventory now is not only complying with the directive but also addressing a risk that already existed.

List of terms: affected claims and how to reword them

The following list covers the terms that occur most frequently in industrial and technical text inventories. The examples in the right-hand column show what a permissible wording can look like; the figures in them are placeholders that you replace with your substantiated values.

List of terms: affected claims and how to reword them
Claim in the text inventory	Problem under EmpCo	Permissible alternative
environmentally friendly, sustainable, green, eco, ecological, kind to the environment	Generic environmental claim without recognised excellent environmental performance	A specific, substantiated property: "Housing made of 60 percent recycled aluminium, verified by supplier certificate"
climate neutral, CO2 neutral, climate positive, CO2 offset (product)	Neutrality through offsetting, prohibited	State actual emissions or reductions; describe offsetting separately as a company commitment, not as a product property
emission-free, zero emissions	Usually the part for the whole: applies to operation, not to manufacture or the energy source	State the scope: "no local emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter in operation"
energy-efficient, climate-friendly	Generic environmental claim	A measured value with a reference: "efficiency 92 percent, measured to the relevant standard" or the official efficiency class
biodegradable, compostable	Generic as long as conditions are missing	Standard and condition: "industrially compostable to EN 13432"
recyclable	Misleading if recycling does not take place in practice	State material and route: "packaging made of pure polyethylene, recyclable via household recycling collection"
produced with green electricity	The part for the whole if only one site or part of the electricity is meant	"Electricity at the Sampletown site sourced entirely from hydropower since 2025, with guarantees of origin"
Own labels such as "Green Line" or "Eco Select"	Labels without a certification scheme, prohibited	Use only recognised, externally certified labels; choose product line names without an environmental reference
Net Zero 2040, climate neutral by 2035	Future promise without a reviewed implementation plan	Only with a published plan and independent review; otherwise name specific steps already achieved
free of substances that are banned anyway; "RoHS compliant" as an advantage	Legal requirement presented as a special feature	Mark it as a mandatory statement ("as required by law") or delete it
Leaf, globe, green colour scheme next to products	Visual environmental claim, to be treated legally like text	Remove, or link it to the specific, substantiated claim

A list of terms alone is not enough. "Green" can be a colour, and "sustainable" can mean "sustainably reducing costs". The most problematic claim in the text inventory is often one with no keyword at all: "Good for your balance sheet and for the planet." That is why the check has to read the context, not just search for words.

Where environmental claims are found

Most companies underestimate how many places such claims appear in. A complete check covers at least:

all websites and language versions, including subpages that nobody maintains any more
product texts in the shop and in the PIM, category texts, meta descriptions and image alt texts
data sheets, brochures and catalogues as PDFs
the press release archive and the blog
the sustainability and careers pages, which are particularly fond of environmental claims
product and product line names in all systems
newsletter templates, email signatures, trade fair material and packaging texts

Checking your text inventory in five steps

Inventory: record all sources and convert them into a readable format, including the PDFs. Only then is the volume known.
Detection: mark every passage that could contain an environmental claim, in all languages, with location, language and surrounding text. A language model pays off here, because it understands the context and also finds claims without a keyword.
Classification: assign each passage to a category, for example permissible, evidence available, reword, delete or refer for legal review. Expect a calibration round: the first classification is almost always too strict and flags sentences that contain no environmental promise at all. A trial run with around a hundred passages, checked together, sharpens the rules.
Guideline and rewording: write an editorial guideline that defines which claims are permissible with which evidence and how they are reworded. Following this guideline, the workflow proposes a new wording for each passage; a person checks and approves it.
Log and maintenance: record every change with location, old and new version, rule and approval. In future, new texts go through the same check before they go online. Otherwise the text inventory will be back where it started within a year.

How it went at a fuel cell manufacturer

A listed manufacturer of fuel cells has ten domains with up to four languages per website. A workflow read the entire text inventory and marked every passage covered by the directive, with location, language and classification. In a dedicated interface, the client can see how many affected passages each page has and which have already been dealt with. An editorial guideline defines which claims are permissible with which evidence; it is both the rulebook for the workflow and the guide for future texts. The rewording is AI-assisted; a person at the client checks and approves every passage, and every change is logged.

The gain lies less in the rewording than in the overview. Anyone who knows where every affected passage is and which have already been dealt with can plan the work, distribute it and demonstrate it to management.

What the AI does, and what it does not

A workflow can read a text inventory that no team can manage by hand, recognise passages in context, classify them according to the guideline and propose rewordings. It cannot decide whether evidence is sufficient. Whether the 60 percent recycled content is correct, whether a label is recognised, whether an implementation plan holds up: your sustainability department and your legal advisers know that. The evidence is a matter of fact about your company, not of wording. That is why approval of each passage lies with a person, and why in our workflows it is a built-in step, not a statement of intent. How we process such text inventories is described under Texts and content at scale; how checks are built for texts at scale is covered in the article Thousands of product texts with AI.

Under the EU AI Act, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the workflow itself is a minimal-risk system; the classification is explained in our article The EU AI Act for mid-sized companies. This article reflects the position as of October 2026 and is not legal advice. Whether an individual claim is permissible is something to clarify with your legal department or a law firm; the list above ensures you arrive there with the right passages.

What this means for you

The directive now applies, and formal warnings are based on what is online today, not on what is planned. Start with the inventory: how many websites, languages, data sheets and product texts do you have? If the number is in the hundreds, an editorial team can manage it with the list of terms above. If it is in the thousands, it calls for a workflow with detection, classification and approval per passage. If you want to know what this would look like for your text inventory, talk to us in a 30-minute call: book a call.

The EmpCo Directive: how to find environmental claims across your entire text inventory and reword them so they can be substantiated