EU declares war on greenwashing: the EU intends to crack down on greenwashing with ‘proportionate’ penalties.
A draft currently circulating within European Union circles, according to the British newspaper the ‘Guardian’, provides that companies will have 10 days to justify environmental claims about their products; otherwise they will face ‘effective, proportionate and dissuasive’ penalties.
The phenomenon of companies’ ‘inflated’ claims about the environmental value of their products has grown in recent years, alongside growing consumer awareness of global warming.
An EU survey in 2020 found that 53% of environmental claims about products were ‘vague, misleading or unfounded’. Another study raised the well-founded suspicion that 42% of green product claims were ‘false or deceptive’.
Now the new directive on green claims, expected in March, will force companies to comply with a new legal framework.
