27 September 2026: six green claims become automatically unfair
Twenty-six days from now, a product claim that was merely risky becomes automatically unfair. Not arguable, not assessed case by case. Unfair in all circumstances, the way a fake countdown timer is unfair.
The law is Directive (EU) 2024/825, the Empowering Consumers Directive, and it applies from 27 September 2026. It is not a passport law and it is not the ESPR. It governs what you are allowed to say about a product, and for most manufacturers in our sectors it arrives years before any passport obligation does.
The date holds even where the law has not arrived
The Empowering Consumers Directive applies on 27 September 2026 regardless of whether a member state has finished transposing it. That is worth stating plainly, because transposition went badly. The deadline was 27 March 2026, and on 28 May 2026 the Commission opened infringement procedures against 20 member states for failing to communicate complete transposition. Bulgaria is on that list, along with Belgium, Czechia, Estonia, Spain, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Portugal.
Germany finished on 19 February 2026 and Italy on 9 March 2026. So a Bulgarian furniture maker selling into Germany is already inside the German version of these rules, whatever Sofia does next.
One more thing about the legal ground here. The Green Claims Directive, which would have added a check before a claim is published, was flagged for withdrawal by the Commission on 20 June 2025. The Empowering Consumers Directive is the live anti-greenwashing law in the EU. If a supplier or a consultant is planning around Green Claims, they are planning around a proposal that is not coming.
Six claims stop being arguable
The Empowering Consumers Directive adds six practices to Annex I of the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. Annex I is the blacklist: practices unfair in all circumstances, with no balancing test and no room to argue that consumers were not actually misled.
Generic environmental claims go first. “Eco-friendly”, “green”, “climate friendly” are banned unless you can show recognised excellent environmental performance, which in practice means the EU Ecolabel or an ISO 14024 Type I scheme such as Nordic Swan or Blue Angel. A generic claim can be rescued by specifying it, with the detail on the same medium as the claim. The Commission’s stated view is that where there is no room to specify, the claim should generally not be made at all.
Carbon-neutrality claims resting on offsetting go next: “climate neutral”, “CO₂ neutral”, “carbon positive”, “net zero”, “climate compensated”. Only claims about actual lifecycle impact survive.
Then sustainability labels that are not based on a third-party certification or a publicly established scheme. You may still run your own label, but the scheme has to be open to competitors and verified by a separate independent legal entity.
The last three are quieter and catch more people. Presenting a legal requirement as a distinctive feature is now unfair, which rules out advertising compliance as a benefit. So is a whole-product claim when only a component qualifies: a “recycled T-shirt” whose recycled content is the stitching. And so are planned obsolescence practices, including withholding information about the negative effects of a software update.
There is no repairability score for textiles, furniture, construction products or steel
The repairability score is the detail this field gets wrong most often. The EU A-to-E repairability score exists only for smartphones, tablets and cordless phones, where it has appeared on the energy label since 20 June 2025. It does not exist for textiles, furniture, construction materials or iron and steel.
The pre-contractual duty in the amended Consumer Rights Directive has two limbs by design. Where a repairability score is established at Union level, you disclose the score. Where one is not, you disclose producer repair information instead: whether repair is available, what it costs approximately, and how the customer goes about it.
For all four of the product groups we work with, the second limb is the one that binds on 27 September. Any vendor telling a furniture manufacturer they need a repairability score for the shelf edge this September is describing a rule that does not exist yet for their sector. The obligation is real; the score is not.
The GARAN label’s QR code does not open a product passport
Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960 fixes the design of two shelf-edge tools that become mandatory on the same day, 27 September 2026. The first is a harmonised EU legal-guarantee notice, a poster or website reminder that every product carries a legal guarantee of conformity of at least two years. The second is a harmonised durability label called GARAN.
GARAN binds the trader, not the producer, and only in a specific case: where a producer offers a commercial guarantee of durability that costs the consumer nothing extra, covers the entire good rather than one component, runs longer than two years, and is made available to the trader. The design is locked down to a fixed title, a calendar symbol, a tick mark and a QR code, at a minimum physical size of 95 by 100 millimetres. Only the duration in years, the brand and the model can change.
That QR code resolves to the Commission’s Your Europe legal-guarantee portal. It does not open a Digital Product Passport, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What is true, and more useful, is that the shelf edge is becoming QR-mediated and information-dense, and that a durability guarantee is only credible if you actually hold durability and expected-lifetime data for the product.
Textiles and furniture need passport-grade data before the passport exists
The Empowering Consumers Directive creates a timing problem that almost nobody plans for. Its claims duties bite on 27 September 2026. The ESPR delegated act for textiles is expected around 2027, with the passport obligation landing roughly 18 months later; furniture is expected in 2028, so around 2029 or 2030. That leaves a gap of three years or more in which you must substantiate environmental claims to a standard the passport was designed to produce, without the passport being legally required of you.
The fields are the same fields. Verified material composition and recycled content. Lifecycle footprint. Durability and expected lifetime. Reparability, spare-parts availability, repair information, after-sales conditions. The Empowering Consumers Directive does not ask for a passport; it asks for evidence that is clear, objective, publicly available and verifiable, and those are the properties structured product data has and a marketing sentence does not.
This is the honest argument for starting early, and it has nothing to do with the passport deadline. Companies that hold this data can make specific claims that replace the banned generic ones. Companies that do not will find that the safe move is to say nothing, which is its own commercial cost.
The penalty, and what actually defends you
Breaches of the Empowering Consumers Directive are punished under the Modernisation Directive (EU) 2019/2161. For widespread infringements it sets a maximum fine of at least 4% of annual turnover, or a minimum of €2 million where turnover figures are unavailable. Member states can go higher, and enforcement sits with national consumer protection authorities working through the CPC cooperation network.
Enforcement is post-market. Nobody approves your claim in advance, which means the question is never “was this cleared” but “what evidence did you hold at the moment the authority asked”. Timestamped, structured, product-level data is the answer to that question. A sustainability report is not, unless the claim came from it.
The precedents already exist under the old rules. The Dutch authority ACM required H&M to revise its “Conscious” and “Conscious Choice” labelling for lacking clear definitions and supporting evidence, and flagged Decathlon over unsubstantiated “Ecodesign” claims. Both happened before the Empowering Consumers Directive tightened anything. From 27 September those cases stop needing an argument about whether consumers were misled.
What to do with the next twenty-six days
Pull every environmental claim you currently make: on packaging, on the website, in the catalogue, in tender documents. For each one, write down the evidence you would hand an inspector. Where the evidence is a supplier’s assurance rather than a document, that claim is the one to change first.
If you want to see what the evidence layer looks like when it is structured rather than asserted, our demo passports show the fields for a real furniture item, a clay masonry unit and a battery, with sources attached. And if you are working out which regulation reaches your products first, the deadline calculator answers that in about a minute.
