{"id":79322,"date":"2023-07-11T09:08:32","date_gmt":"2023-07-11T07:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bioecoactual.com\/?p=79322"},"modified":"2024-08-12T09:19:29","modified_gmt":"2024-08-12T07:19:29","slug":"consumers-empowerment-and-claims-substantiation-an-end-to-greenwashing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bioecoactual.com\/en\/2023\/07\/11\/consumers-empowerment-and-claims-substantiation-an-end-to-greenwashing\/","title":{"rendered":"Consumers Empowerment and Claims Substantiation: An end to greenwashing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The UN Guidelines for Providing Product Sustainability Information provides a definition for greenwashing. However, the current EU Cosmetics Regulation does not provide a means to unambiguously identify when a natural or organic cosmetic product claim risks the consumer is being misleading – meaning that natural and organic cosmetics remain at risk from greenwashing.
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In the pursuit of climate neutrality, the green transition\u2019s drive towards a more sustainable, circular economy also requires changing consumption behaviours. Indeed, in 2019 the EU Commission (EC) stated that “reliable, comparable and verifiable information also plays an important part in enabling buyers to make more sustainable decisions and reduces the risk of greenwashing<\/em>.” The consequences of lack of appropriate information include loss of consumer welfare, negative environmental impacts through misinformed choices, and harm to single market by affecting faircompetition across the Union.<\/p>\n

To tackle this need to empower and protect consumers by providing more reliable and relevant claims, allowing for a more harmonised approach to environmental information, and unlocking the opportunities of the green and circular economy, the EC opted for a complimentary, two-fold approach:<\/p>\n

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  1. to add a new Directive on Green Claims to reduce the proliferation of inconsistent methods and initiatives leading to too many misleading environmental claims;<\/li>\n
  2. to amend Directives 2005\/29\/EC, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UPCD), and 2011\/83\/EU (consumer rights) to act as a strong safety net for those claims not covered by the Green Claims Directive.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Since both (1) and (2) are Directives, the legislative act sets out a goal that all EU countries must achieve, but individual EU Member States can still devise their own laws on how to reach these goals. Consequently, the approaches are not as harmonised as a Regulation, which must be applied in its entirety across the EU.<\/p>\n

    In the pursuit of climate neutrality, the green transition\u2019s drive towards a more sustainable, circular economy also requires changing consumption behaviours<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    For cosmetics, the relationship between the sectoral Cosmetics Regulation (EU CPR) and the horizontal UCPD is that both aim to protect consumers from misleading claims, with the UCPD applying in a complimentary manner to cosmetic claims. For cosmetic product claims the provisions of the EU CPR prevail due to specific rules (lex specialis) over the UCPD; so specific aspects of unfair commercial practices are regulated by the EU CPR. This is due to the existence of Regulation (EC) No.655\/2013 and the accompanying technical guidance document, which offers a sector-specific framework for assessing cosmetic claims within the scope of the Article 20 (product claims) of the EU CPR . However, there is still no precise guidance or regulatory definition under Article 20 for environmental claims \u2013 including natural and organic claims.<\/p>\n

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    In March 2022, the EC adopted their proposal to amend Directives 2005\/29\/EC and 2011\/83\/EU. In the context of greenwashing, the proposition laid out a \u2018black list\u2019 of commercial practices to:<\/p>\n