Are you marketing products as green, eco-friendly or organic? In this article, we have teamed up with the CBI to guide business on making accurate green claims.
Read the CMA’s detailed Green Claims guidance (or check out a shorter guidance Green Claims Code campaign).
Guiding principles – claims must:
- be truthful and accurate
- be clear and unambiguous
- not omit or hide important relevant information
- consider the full life cycle of the product or service
- be substantiated
- comparisons must be fair and meaningful
Environmental claims need to be accurate
Environmental claims suggest that a product, service, process, brand or business is better for the environment; is less damaging to the environment than a previous version of the same good or service; or is less damaging to the environment than competing goods or services.
When an environmental claim properly describes the impact of the product, service, process, brand or business, and doesn’t hide or misrepresent crucial information, then it’s a genuine claim.
Misleading environmental claims happen if a business makes claims, or leaves out or hides information, to give the impression that what’s being sold is less harmful or more beneficial to the environment than it really is.
Things to watch out for…
Things to watch out for…
Avoid blanket terms
Broad, general, or absolute claims are more likely to be inaccurate and misleading, e.g., ‘green’, ‘sustainable’ or ‘eco-friendly’ are likely to be seen as suggesting that a product/ service has a positive environmental impact, or at least no adverse impact, from the beginning of its life to the end. Unless a business can prove that, you might be falling short in firm’s legal obligations.
Example 1: misleading use of a term
Claiming a pair of jeans are ‘organic’ when only 35% of their material is from organic cotton is misleading. The generally understood meaning of ‘organic’ is that virtually the entirety of the product meets that description. If only a proportion of the product is organic, the claim must be sp
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