Is Your Website Greenwashing?

Two texts matter. The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) has long treated misleading environmental statements as an unfair commercial practice. Directive (EU) 2024/825, known as the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition directive, amends it and adds a list of practices that are unfair in all circumstances. Member States transpose it by 27 March 2026 and the national measures apply from 27 September 2026. A separate Green Claims Directive, proposed in 2023, is still under negotiation and is not the text that will apply in September 2026: plan against 2024/825.

Directive (EU) 2024/825 inserts them into Annex I of Directive 2005/29/EC. Point 4a: making a generic environmental claim when you cannot demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to the claim, which covers wording such as environmentally friendly, eco-friendly, green, climate friendly or biodegradable used on their own. Point 4b: making a claim about the whole product or the whole business when it concerns only one aspect. Point 4c: claiming neutral, reduced or positive impact on the climate on the basis of emissions offsetting. Point 2a: displaying a sustainability label that is not based on a certification scheme and was not established by public authorities. Specific, substantiated claims remain possible: it is the vague and the unprovable that are targeted.

Start with the pages that sell: home page, product pages, the sustainability section, and the footer, where taglines often sit. Read them as a regulator would, claim by claim, and for each one ask what evidence you would produce if asked tomorrow. Our scanner does the reading part: it goes through your pages, flags the wording covered by the directive, tells you which point of Annex I it falls under, and suggests what to write instead. On a paid plan it reads the whole site rather than a single page and gives you the result as a PDF you can circulate internally.

No, and we will not pretend otherwise. A scan tells you which wording is at risk; it cannot tell you whether the evidence behind a claim is solid, because we do not hold that evidence. It also cannot judge images, video or claims made on paper and in stores. And when a page contains too little readable text for us to assess it, we say so and issue no grade rather than a reassuring one. Treat the report as a starting point for your legal review, not as a certificate.

English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese and Swedish. That matters more than it sounds: the directive applies across the single market, but most scanners only recognise English wording, so a Polish or Swedish page comes back clean simply because nobody looked for the local phrasing. We maintain the banned and restricted formulations in all nine languages, including their inflected forms.