EmpCo enforcement begins September 27: what your brand needs to do this week

The EmpCo Directive — Directive (EU) 2024/825 on empowering consumers for the green transition — reaches its national application milestone on 27 September 2026. From that point, Member State rules implementing it apply to how you talk about your products. If your website, packaging or marketplace listings say anything about the environment, this is the week to act.

One clarification first, because the naming confusion is costing people time. The separate Green Claims Directive proposal was withdrawn. EmpCo is the law that is actually arriving, and it works by amending the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive. That means enforcement runs through consumer-protection authorities you may already deal with, using tools they already have: orders to stop, corrective statements, fines calculated against turnover, and in the marketplace context, removal of listings.

What EmpCo actually changes

EmpCo does three things at once.

It bans a defined set of claims outright, regardless of evidence. It requires that permitted environmental claims be substantiated before publication. And it regulates sustainability labels and durability information, including a ban on self-invented certification marks that look like third-party accreditation.

The important shift is the burden of proof. Under the old regime, a vague claim was risky. Under EmpCo, a generic claim without published substantiation is presumptively unfair. You do not get to argue about it after the fact; you are expected to hold the evidence at the moment you publish.

The claims that are banned outright

Generic environmental claims without demonstrated excellence. "Eco-friendly", "green", "environmentally friendly", "kind to the planet", "conscious", "sustainable" used as a bare adjective. These are prohibited unless you can demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to the claim. In practice, most brands cannot, and the correct action is deletion or replacement with a specific, measurable statement.

Whole-product claims based on one attribute. A shampoo whose bottle contains recycled plastic is not "a sustainable product". Claiming that the entire product or business is environmentally superior because of a single aspect is expressly caught.

Carbon-neutrality claims based on offsetting. This is the change that surprises people most. Claiming a product is carbon neutral, climate neutral, net zero, CO2-compensated or climate-positive on the basis of purchased offsets is prohibited. Offsetting itself is not illegal; advertising it as neutrality of the product is.

Self-created sustainability labels. A leaf badge, a green shield or a "certified sustainable" mark of your own design, presented as if it were third-party certification, is banned. Labels must be based on a certification scheme or established by public authorities.

Claiming legal minimums as a benefit. Presenting something you are legally required to do — a mandatory two-year conformity guarantee, for instance — as a special feature of your offer.

Durability and repair misdirection. Claims about lifespan or repairability that are not supported by testing, and software-update messaging that misleads about how long a product will remain functional.

What substantiation looks like in practice

For each surviving claim you need three things on file: what precisely is being claimed; the evidence supporting it, appropriate to the claim type; and the scope of the claim — which part of the product, which lifecycle stage, compared against what baseline.

Comparative claims deserve particular care. "40% less water than our previous formulation" is defensible if you have the two figures and the method. "40% less water" with no comparator is not a claim, it is a hint, and hints are where enforcement starts.

Recycled content claims need supplier evidence, and the percentage needs a stated basis — by weight of the packaging, by weight of the plastic component, by weight of the whole product. Those three numbers are very different, and stating the wrong one is a substantiation failure even when the underlying material is genuinely recycled.

What enforcement looks like

Because EmpCo works through the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, penalties are set nationally, and several Member States already provide for fines calculated as a percentage of turnover in cross-border cases. Consumer authorities can require you to publish corrective information, which is often more commercially painful than the fine.

For sellers on marketplaces there is a faster and blunter mechanism: platforms de-risk themselves by removing listings. A listing pulled during peak season does more damage than a penalty that arrives eighteen months later, and it needs no court.

Complaints are also cheap to make. Competitors, NGOs and consumers can all trigger a review, and screenshots of your own website are the evidence.

Do this in the next five working days

Day 1 — collect every claim. Product pages, packaging artwork, marketplace listings, email templates, paid ads, PDF catalogues, the About page. Put every environmental statement in one list with a link to where it appears. Most brands are surprised by the volume, and the older assets are usually the worst offenders.

Day 2 — triage into three buckets. Banned outright, keep with evidence, and rewrite to something specific. Anything containing "eco", "green", "sustainable", "carbon neutral", "climate", "planet" or "natural" as a standalone descriptor goes in the first bucket by default until proven otherwise.

Day 3 — kill the banned claims. Deletion is a legitimate, fast, zero-cost compliance strategy. Removing a vague adjective costs you far less than defending it.

Day 4 — build the evidence file. For each retained claim, save the supporting document with the claim text and the URL where it appears. If the evidence does not exist, the claim moves to bucket one.

Day 5 — fix labels and guarantees. Remove self-designed sustainability badges. Check that any durability, repairability or update-period statement matches what you can support, and that the statutory guarantee is not dressed up as a bonus.

What "good" reads like afterwards

Before: "Our eco-friendly, carbon-neutral packaging is kind to the planet."

After: "Our shipping cartons contain 80% post-consumer recycled fibre (supplier declaration, March 2026) and are recyclable in kerbside paper collection across the EU."

The second version is longer, less lyrical, and defensible. It also converts better in most tests, because it says something.

Marketplace listings need the same treatment as your own site

Brands often clean their own storefront and forget the channels. Amazon bullet points, Etsy tags, eBay item specifics, retailer-supplied product feeds and syndicated content all carry your claims, and all of them are visible to a complainant. Where a retailer generated the copy from an old feed, the claim is still attached to your product in the buyer's eyes.

Two practical steps. First, export your product feed and search it for the banned vocabulary; a feed search finds in minutes what page-by-page review misses in a week. Second, tell your retail partners in writing which claims have been withdrawn and supply the replacement text, so the correction propagates instead of reappearing at the next feed refresh.

Keep the evidence in one place

Whatever you retain needs to be findable by someone other than the person who wrote it. A single register works: the claim text exactly as published, every URL and asset where it appears, the evidence file, the date the evidence was produced, the scope of the claim, and who signed it off. When a consumer authority or a marketplace compliance team asks, you send an extract of that register rather than starting an internal investigation.

Refresh it on a schedule. Evidence ages: a supplier declaration from 2023 does not support a 2026 recycled-content percentage if the supplier changed material in between. An annual review, plus a review whenever a supplier or formulation changes, keeps the register honest.

What to expect after September 27

Enforcement will not be uniform on day one. Expect consumer authorities in the more active Member States to run sweeps of visible sectors — fashion, cosmetics, household goods, food and drink — and expect complaint-driven cases to move faster than sweeps. Marketplaces will act on the vocabulary rather than the evidence, because scanning text is cheap and reviewing substantiation is not.

The overlap you should not ignore

Environmental claims about packaging sit inside both EmpCo and the PPWR. Recycled-content percentages, recyclability statements and sorting information are governed as packaging facts by one regime and as consumer claims by the other. Fix them once, in one evidence file, and use the same numbers in both places. Divergence between your packaging documentation and your marketing copy is exactly the pattern an investigator looks for.

Educational information only, not legal advice. National implementing measures differ in detail and in penalty level — confirm your position for each market with a qualified advisor.