Greenwashing in the EU, France and the UK: comparative overview and best practice

(8 min read)

In this briefing, our teams in Paris and London compare and contrast recent regulatory activity aimed at tackling greenwashing claims across three jurisdictions – the EU, France and the UK. The key practical takeaways for retail and consumer businesses wanting to make environmental claims are captured in our do's and don'ts.

Parallels

Differences

Legislative measures taken and their scope

Both the EU as a whole and France specifically have introduced legislative proposals which are dedicated to addressing misleading actions and omissions in the specific field of environmental and sustainability claims. In France, Directive 2005/29/EC has been transposed into French law in the Consumer Code. The legal framework is set by the provisions on misleading commercial practices.

In contrast, the UK approach relies on general consumer protection rules relating to misleading claims to tackle greenwashing issues as a type of misleading claim. While the DMCC Act will, from Spring 2025, introduce an entirely new consumer law enforcement regime, this focuses on strengthening enforcement powers in the consumer protection field by creating a new administrative procedure so that the CMA can investigate and impose higher fines directly on offending businesses without needing to resort to court proceedings.

This difference in approach has also had an effect on the scope of the legislative measures taken. In particular, the EU as a whole and France specifically have included provisions aimed at promoting better product repairs and longevity, whereas the UK framework would only capture this to the extent businesses made misleading claims in relation to their product's life expectancy or repairability. For example, the EU's expanded list of automatically unfair practices under Directive 2005/29/EC (as recently amended by Directive 2024/825/EC) goes beyond misleading claims and includes:

"any commercial communication in relation to a good containing a feature introduced to limit its durability despite information on the feature and its effects on the durability of the good being available to the trader"; and
"inducing the consumer to replace or replenish the consumables of a good earlier than necessary for technical reasons".

The DMCC Act does however provide the UK Government with the power to adopt a similar approach to the EU and France, and add (via secondary legislation) specific behaviours to the list of automatically unfair consumer practices under the DMCC Act should it wish to specifically tackle issues such as the above via consumer law in future (section 242).

Oversight and enforcement processes

France and the UK differ in their respective approaches to consumer protection oversight and enforcement at a national level.

French framework

In France, the DGCCRF is primarily competent to combat greenwashing issues. As in the UK, environmental claims were previously assessed in the context of a general prohibition against unfair commercial practices – but more specific powers were recently introduced to tackle the issue more directly and impose higher penalties for non-compliance (for example, through Article 11 of the Climate Law).

The DGCCRF monitors and enforces the proper implementation of measures, such as labelling. The DGCCRF may carry out its investigations in conjunction with sectoral regulatory authorities (for instance the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, for acts likely to undermine the protection of investors and the proper functioning of financial markets) and the Autorité de la Concurrence (for anti-competitive practices), but it would retain jurisdiction in consumer protection matters. Following an investigation, the DGCCRF may impose an administrative fine, or start proceedings before the Tribunal de Grande Instance or the Commercial Court for a civil penalty to be imposed.

More generally, fines and penalties for greenwashing can be civil, criminal or administrative, depending on the infringement. In addition to public enforcement, French consumer protection provisions may be used by companies in unfair competition proceedings if a competitor's environmental claims are unfounded.

The French legal framework will be further strengthened from 2026 with the transposition of Directive 2024/825/EU and the Green Claims Directive. The main changes these will bring are:

creation of a European-level definition of environmental claims;
identification of twelve commercial practices as unfair and prohibited in all circumstances;
reversal of the burden of proof for “generic” claims (e.g., “environmentally friendly”, “green”) unless they are accompanied by clear specifications or demonstrated excellent environmental performance;
introduction of a requirement for professionals to back up environmental claims and labels with independent, peer-reviewed, and verifiable scientific evidence, which must be made public; and
introduction of a requirement for new environmental label systems to obtain prior authorisation.

UK framework

In the UK, many different public authorities have consumer protection powers – in addition to the CMA, these include sectoral regulators such as the Civil Aviation Authority, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Ofcom, as well as the Information Commissioner and every local weights and measures authority in Great Britain. For example, the FCA is leading regulatory action against greenwashing claims in the financial sector using sector-specific powers to introduce a package of measures for investment products. The Advertising Standards Agency also plays a role in so far as media advertisements are concerned.

Other than in highly regulated sectors such as telecommunications and financial services, UK consumer law enforcement has been hindered to date by the need to enforce breaches via court proceedings and the limited sanctions available under the current regime. However, as noted above, the DMCC Act will bolster the CMA's enforcement powers with a new administrative procedure enabling the direct enforcement of consumer protection rules and higher sanctioning limits (up to 10% of annual turnover)– in time, this could position the CMA as the leading consumer law enforcer in the UK, but other regulators are likely to continue to have a role to play in the UK's consumer protection framework.

Evidential expectations

There are signs that the future EU and French frameworks are shaping up to be more prescriptive than the UK’s in terms of providing evidence in support of environmental claims.

Each regime – whether prescribed by regulation in the case of the EU and France, or by guidance and enforcement practice in the UK – expects suppliers to support their claims with appropriate evidence.

At EU level, the European Commission's Guidance on the interpretation and application of Directive 2005/29/EC specifies that environmental or ecological claims must be presented in a clear, specific, accurate and unambiguous manner. It follows from this that all generic claims that are not based on accessible and understandable evidence must be avoided. This is the case, for example, with the terms ‘environmentally friendly’, ‘green’, ‘nature-friendly’, ‘ecological’, ‘ecologically correct’, ‘climate-friendly’ or ‘preserves the environment’.

In France, any environmental claim must be explicit and precise so as not to mislead consumers or sow doubt in their mind. It must aim to inform consumers fairly about the environmental characteristics of the product or service and must be based on scientific evidence or recognised methods.

In the UK, the Green Claims Code makes clear that firms should have robust, credible, relevant and up-to-date evidence available to support any claims made. As all green claims cases to date have resulted in the acceptance of undertakings, it is currently unclear precisely what evidence the CMA would accept as substantiating a claim in any investigation. At a minimum however, it is clear from its recent guidance to the fashion retail sector that retailers of fashion items should hold evidence to support any percentage related claims made, e.g. supplier certificates or proof of appropriate testing.

The EU however appears to be going a step further through the proposed Green Claims Directive. This Directive would require that explicit environmental claims and labels are supported by independent, peer-reviewed, widely recognised, robust and verifiable scientific evidence. These justifications would have to be made public and provided together with the claim or certification by means of a website link, QR code, digital passport or any other equivalent (Article 5).

At this stage, we understand that independent, accredited verifiers would be tasked by individual EU Member States with examining the conformity of these environmental claims or certifications and drawing up a certificate of conformity prior to the use of the claim or certification by the professional. For the most common claims, the European Commission could establish, by delegated act, a simplified verification system that could include a presumption of conformity. The verifier who has issued a certificate of conformity would be responsible for the accuracy of the assessment of the claim and could be held liable if an investigation reveals that they have been negligent in their assessment.

Key do's and don'ts