The EU Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition two years on: what it requires and where the Member States stand

Directive (EU) 2024/825, otherwise known as the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive ("EmpCo"), amends the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive. Its aim is to empower EU consumers to make better-informed and sustainable purchasing decisions while strengthening protection against misleading environmental claims.

The EmpCo came into force on 26 March 2024. Member States were required to adopt and publish national implementing measures by 27 March 2026, with those measures to apply from 27 September 2026 without a transition period. From that date, traders must ensure that their commercial practices comply with the new requirements, including for existing products and packaging already manufactured, ordered or distributed before the application date. Rather than destroying or recalling any non-compliant products, practical remediation measures may be acceptable, such as covering or correcting non-compliant claims with stickers or providing supplementary information at the point of sale.

Although the rules now apply, compliance across the EU is not straightforward. National implementing measures differ between Member States, and a number of Member States had not transposed EmpCo by the application date (see "Transposition status across Member States" below). The result for a trader selling across the EU is uneven. In the markets that transposed early, traders have had final national rules for many months and could prepare for their application on 27 September 2026. Traders operating in several Member States therefore need to track the position market by market rather than rely on a single EU-wide compliance approach.

EmpCo applies only to business-to-consumer commercial practices, so environmental claims made in wholesale, supply-chain or investor-facing contexts are not directly subject to its requirements, unless the information is repurposed in consumer-facing marketing in the EU such as social media content or a retail product website. Importers and private-label retailers inherit responsibility for upstream claims they repeat on packaging, websites or marketplace listings; if a retailer's own product page describes a product as "eco-friendly", the retailer is the trader for that claim. The business-to-business carve-out is also not guaranteed across the EU, as Member States can extend equivalent protection to business-to-business relations in national law. Traders should therefore check each national measure rather than assume the carve-out holds in every Member State.

Prohibited Practices

Certain provisions in EmpCo leave Member States no room for manoeuvre, either when transposing or when applying them. In particular, it adds the following to the EU-wide blacklist of commercial practices that are prohibited in all circumstances:

• Generic environmental claims such as "environmentally friendly", "green" or "eco" for which the trader is not able to demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to the claim. An "environmental claim" is given a broad meaning, covering any message or representation, including text, imagery, symbols, brand names and company names, and extending to digital products. "Recognised excellent environmental performance" means performance that complies with the EU Ecolabel, with a nationally or regionally officially recognised EN ISO 14024 type I environmental labelling scheme or with top environmental performance under other applicable EU law.
• Sustainability labels that are not based on a certification scheme or not established by public authorities. A "sustainability label" covers any voluntary trust mark, quality mark or equivalent that aims to distinguish a product, process or business on the basis of its environmental or social characteristics, or both. Traders must therefore ensure that any sustainability label is based on a certification scheme that meets the minimum conditions of transparency and credibility.
• Overly broad environmental claims about an entire product or a trader's entire business when it concerns only a certain aspect of the product or a specific activity of the trader's business. For example, implying that an entire product is recycled when only part of it is, such as its packaging, is not allowed. The overall product presentation should be an accurate representation of the scale of the environmental benefit without overstating the benefit achieved.
• Offsetting-based climate neutrality claims at the product level, such as "climate neutral" or "CO₂ offset." These claims are only allowed when based on the actual lifecycle impact of the product within its own value chain. Traders can still market investments in environmental initiatives, provided this is done transparently and does not mislead consumers.

New information duties

Separate from the blacklisted practices, which prohibit particular conduct, EmpCo also introduces new information duties on traders, including:

• Pre-contractual information obligations requiring traders to provide consumers with information on the durability, reparability, and legal guarantee rights attached to goods.
• Introduction of a harmonised EU guarantee label and notice, allowing consumers to see at a glance products that benefit from a voluntary commercial guarantee of durability exceeding two years. A harmonised notice on legal guarantee rights must also be displayed at the point of sale.

Case-by-case assessment and national discretion

The EmpCo provides for a case-by-case assessment of potentially misleading practices, including:

• Restriction on future environmental performance claims, such as pledges to achieve carbon neutrality by a certain date, unless the claims are supported by clear, objective, publicly available, and verifiable commitments set out in a detailed and realistic implementation plan which is regularly verified by an independent third-party expert whose findings are made available to consumers.
• Advertising irrelevant benefits meaning benefits for consumers that are irrelevant and do not result from any feature of the product or business.

Other aspects of EmpCo leave Member States a degree of discretion, either because the Directive expressly leaves the matter to national law or because its open-ended standards must be applied by national authorities and courts case by case, including:

• Enforcement is led by national law, which determines which authorities enforce the new rules, through which procedures, and whether competitors and consumer organisations can bring claims. National authorities and courts may take into account the gravity of the infringement and the specific circumstances of the case. This may include whether the trader has made reasonable and proportionate efforts to comply, including in relation to products already in the distribution chain, and whether the measures required to ensure compliance would entail disproportionate costs or unnecessary environmental harm.
• "Old stock" situations (i.e., products already manufactured, ordered or distributed before the new rules began to apply on 27 September 2026): when determining how to enforce the new rules, national competent authorities may adopt a phased approach in the early stages of application. Authorities may review in particular environmental claims already addressed through enforcement action or guidelines under the existing UCPD rules, online claims, practices that are the most harmful to consumers, non-packaging claims, marketing materials, products with shorter shelf-life or faster stock rotation, and products not expected to create genuine transitional difficulties.

Transposition Status across Member States

As set out in the EUR-Lex National Transposition Measures database, the position on transposition varies significantly across the 27 Member States.

Eight Member States have notified no transposition measure at all: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. France has work in progress but no final measure. That is nine markets where the national rules were not in place on the application date.

At the other end, some Member States moved well ahead of the deadline. Denmark adopted its measure on 28 May 2025, more than a year before the rules applied, and Slovakia followed on 19 November 2025. Hungary, by contrast, notified its measure only on 27 September 2026, the application date itself.