EmpCo Directive 2026: What Applies to Green Claims from 27 September

From 27 September 2026, the EmpCo Directive changes what you may print on a pack, a tariff sheet or a landing page. Directive (EU) 2024/825 does not ask you to have claims verified in advance. It bans a defined set of them outright, offset-based carbon neutrality among them. If your compliance project is still named after the Green Claims Directive, it is aimed at the wrong act.

What applies from 27 September 2026: the EmpCo Directive

Directive (EU) 2024/825 of 28 February 2024 amends two existing acts: the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC and the Consumer Rights Directive 2011/83/EU. Its subject is empowering consumers for the green transition, which is where the short name EmpCo comes from.

The dates are fixed. Member States had to transpose it by 27 March 2026, and the rules apply from 27 September 2026. They may not weaken the provisions, so the substance is the same everywhere even where the numbering is not. Germany transposed it through the third act amending the Act against Unfair Competition (UWG), effective on the same September date.

The mechanism is what makes it bite. EmpCo introduces no approval procedure and no independent verifier. It extends Annex I of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, the blacklist of practices considered unfair in all circumstances. For an item on that list there is no balancing of interests, no materiality test and no size threshold. What counts is whether you address consumers with an environmental claim, on a label, in an ad, in an app or on a tariff page.

Which claims become unlawful and which stay allowed

An environmental claim is any voluntary statement in a commercial context attributing a positive or neutral environmental effect, or an improvement, to a product or a trader. A generic environmental claim is one made without clear and prominent specification on the same medium.

One further per se item belongs here: a property the law already requires may not be sold as a distinctive feature. Everything else stays allowed, provided the specification sits on the same medium as the claim and you can produce the evidence behind it.

Why the Green Claims Directive no longer decides this

The Green Claims Directive was a separate proposal, COM/2023/166 of 22 March 2023. It would have required explicit environmental claims to be substantiated in advance, on a life cycle basis, and checked by an independent verifier before publication. On 20 June 2025 the Commission announced its intention to withdraw it, trilogue negotiations have been suspended since, and the text is neither formally withdrawn nor actively pursued. You can follow the file in the European Parliament's Legislative Train Schedule.

What has not gone away is the finding behind it. The Commission's 2020 review of environmental claims found 53 percent of them vague, misleading or unfounded and 40 percent without supporting evidence. EmpCo carries that finding into the blacklist rather than into a verification procedure. Building a 2026 claims project around a suspended proposal delays work that is already legally due.

What EmpCo means for energy and utility claims

Energy suppliers are more exposed than most sectors, because the product name is the claim. "Green electricity", "100 percent renewable", "climate-neutral gas" and "cleaner than the grid mix" are environmental claims in the meaning of the directive, and they sit on the tariff sheet rather than in a sustainability report.

Three cases separate cleanly. A tariff sold as climate neutral because the supplier retires offset certificates runs straight into the per se prohibition. A comparative claim needs a stated baseline, a stated method and a comparison that is genuinely equivalent. And a renewable claim carried only by unbundled guarantees of origin buys a paper attribute, not a physical supply, which is the electricity-market version of offsetting: the certificate is cheap precisely because it changes nothing. Where delivery is backed by a power purchase agreement or your own generation, the same sentence on the tariff sheet is defensible.

How to make claims EmpCo-ready before 27 September 2026

Start with the claims, not with the product range. List every environmental claim on packaging, the website, datasheets, social posts, tariff sheets and sales decks, and give each one an owner. For each claim the owner should be able to produce, on request:

• the figure and the calculation behind it, not the slide it appeared on;
• the system boundary and the baseline year, stated explicitly;
• the standard applied, for example ISO 14067 for a product footprint or the life cycle assessment behind a comparison;
• proof that the evidence covers everything the wording covers, packaging components included;
• for a label, the scheme documents and the current audit report;
• the date of the last review and the person who signed it off.

Then run one sign-off route. Marketing drafts, the sustainability function checks the figure against the Scope 3 data, legal checks the wording, and nothing goes live without the file behind it.

One reaction to avoid: going quiet. Companies that do perform are already deleting claims they could defend, for fear of being challenged. From 27 September the vague claims of your competitors disappear, which makes a specific and substantiated one worth more than it was. The rule does not penalise communication about environmental performance, it penalises unsubstantiated communication.

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