Since the European Commission adopted the Green Claims Directive in March 2023, the Parliament and Council have been negotiating on the content and wording of a draft report.
The directive aims to protect consumers from greenwashing: the use of unconfirmed, vague ‘green’ claims about goods and services that are at best misleading and in the worst case, simply untrue.
The Green Claims Directive would set requirements on how to communicate green claims and introduce rules on environmental labelling schemes. Compliance with these requirements would have to be verified and certified by a third party. Currently, about 75% of the products on the EU market carry an implicit or explicit green claim of some kind. Yet, the sheer number of different labels- there are 230 ecolabels available in the EU - can be bewildering for consumers. Their environmental claims can be unreliable, unsubstantiated, and lacking in credibility, making it difficult for consumers to make a truly informed choice.
The directive would also require companies to substantiate the voluntary green claims they make in business-to-consumer commercial practices, by complying with several requirements regarding their assessment, for example, by presenting results of a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). However, the directive does not stipulate any single method of assessment as the only valid way to substantiate green claims.
European Bioplastics together with another 11 associations in the European materials industry published a joint statement on the Green Claims Directive yesterday. As negations progress, they are calling on the European Commission to consider four provisions on how to ensure consumers have access to ‘reliable, comparable, and verifiable information’.
Amongst them is the call to clarify rules for the comparison of different product categories and further develop methods to calculate the life-cycle environmental impacts of products.
Whilst the associations welcome the Commission’s ‘decision to enable flexibility’ by not stipulating a single method of assessment to substantiate green claims. In particular, the associations argue that the EU’s recommend LCA method, the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), ‘does not cover all steps of a product’s life cycle’, making it inapplicable throughout diverse value chains.
For European Bioplastics, it is of ‘outmost importance that biogenic carbon is taken up in any methodology to verify and proof an environmental claim’, the association wrote on LinkedIn. The joint statement says that the ‘PEF method, like any LCA method, does not currently cover all environmental aspects that society deems relevant, nor all the positive externalities derived from different sectors such as including avoidance of food waste, the uptake of biogenic carbon and recyclability.’
Calculating the LCA of bioplastics has long been a matter of controversy. Bioplastic proponents argue that not accounting for biogenic carbon, which refers to carbon removed from the atmosphere when feedstock grows, and is eventually released back into the atmosphere at the polymer’s end-of-life, leads to misrepresentation of the global warming potential of bioplastics.
Given that bioplastics and other materials, like paper, temporarily store CO2, the scope of their LCAs is also of particular importance (e.g. cradle-to-gate versus cradle-to-grave).
In this respect, the twelve associations urge the Commission to recognise that “the provisions for comparative environmental claims need to be clarified with appropriate reference to existing ISO standards on LCAs in order to allow for a correct comparison of products of different product categories with different environmental impacts. Clear rules need to be established to univocally identify the boundaries of the scope of the comparison and the baseline to which the comparison itself is made.”
Alongside European Bioplastics, the other signatories of the joint statement are the: Biobased Industries Consortium; Confederation of European Paper Industries; International Confederation of Paper and Board Converters in Europe; European farmers and European agri-cooperatives; European Carton Makers Association; European Furniture Industries Confederation; European Tissue Symposium; European Federation of Corrugated Board Manufacturers; Federation envelopes and for light and e-commerce packaging in Europe; Crafts & SMEs in Europe; European Association of Carton and Cartonboard manufacturers.
Their other asks are:
- Ensure consistency of the Directive with relevant EU legislation while maintaining a level-playing field with imported products;
- Ensure (information) requirements are strictly relevant to the substantiation and protect confidential information; and
- Ensure that existing, well-known third-party verified environmental certification schemes and labels are not facing obstacles in their verification.