EmpCo is now live. So what should your next move be?

Why now is the right moment to join The Anti-Greenwash Charter.

On 27 September, the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive (EmpCo) began to apply across the EU. It bans generic environmental claims, such as “eco-friendly” or “sustainable”, that cannot be backed by recognised excellent environmental performance, along with claims of carbon neutrality based on offsetting. And it applies to everything still live, not just new campaigns.

For many organisations, the past year has been spent getting ready.

Claims have been audited, vague language retired and evidence rebuilt. It was careful, necessary work. It was also almost entirely invisible.

Don’t fall silent

Having been through that process, it is tempting to conclude that the safest claim is no claim at all. But staying quiet wastes the very thing the audit created. A brand that knows exactly what it can prove is in a stronger position to communicate than ever.

Compliance is the floor. It tells you what you must not say. It does not tell your customers that you can be trusted.

A public layer of protection

The Charter turns private work into public proof. Certified signatories publish a Green Claims Policy, have their communications reviewed on an ongoing basis, and are supported by an independent process for handling concerns. The Charter is not a regulator and does not replace legal obligations, but a documented, independently reviewed approach puts you in a far stronger position if a claim is ever questioned.

That protects your reputation and reduces regulatory and financial risk.

Credibility that sets you apart

The Charter mark is earned, not bought, and certified signatories are actively promoted across Charter channels. As EmpCo pushes the whole market to tone down its language, many brands will start to sound the same. Those that can show their workings will stand out.

Being seen as a responsible communicator becomes a genuine competitive advantage, and a lasting source of trust with your customers.

Why now

Your evidence is current and the people who gathered it are still close to it, so much of what the Charter’s assessment asks for already exists. Those who move first help define what good looks like. And scrutiny of sustainability claims is only increasing.

EmpCo has raised the floor. Joining the Charter shows your standards sit well above it.

Building Trust, Together.

Be Recognised for Responsible Marketing and Communications

👉 Become a signatory of The Anti-Greenwash Charter.
Shape the future of responsible communication and show stakeholders what trusted sustainability leadership looks like.

Join the Charter →

EmpCo Is Coming. The Brands Already Doing This Well Have Nothing to Fear.

EmpCo, the EU’s new rule on green claims, takes effect on 27 September 2026, and the brands already committed to evidence-based sustainability communication have nothing to fear from it.

From 27 September 2026, a claim like “eco-friendly” on a product sold in the EU will need proof behind it. This is the effect of Directive (EU) 2024/825, known as EmpCo, the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive.

For brands that have already built real evidence behind their sustainability claims, this is not a new burden.

It is a legal standard catching up with where they already stand.

What EmpCo changes

EmpCo updates two existing pieces of EU consumer law. It became law in March 2024. Member states had until 27 March 2026 to bring it into their own national laws. The rules take effect on 27 September 2026, with no grace period for existing stock.

Three changes matter most for marketing teams:

1. First, generic claims like “green,” “eco-friendly” or “climate-friendly” will be unlawful unless a brand can prove genuinely excellent environmental performance.
2. Second, brands can no longer create or certify their own sustainability labels; a label now needs to come from a recognised public or independent body.
3. Third, a “climate neutral” claim built only on buying offsets, rather than on real reductions, is banned.

None of this should be a surprise. It simply brings the law into line with what careful communicators have been doing for years.

What our roundtable found

Our recent report, Trusted Communications for Purpose-Led Brands, brought together nine purpose-led brands, including COOK, Huel and Tony’s Chocolonely, to talk about how they build trust through sustainability communication. What they described lines up closely with EmpCo.

Participants said they had cut back the number of claims they make. They now lead with one clear, well-evidenced statement instead of a broad one. They also said they had replaced blanket percentage claims with specific figures tied to a named product, because a broad claim only needs one exception to fall apart. And they described a two-step review: someone checks the evidence first, then someone else improves the wording.

These practices already meet the standard EmpCo sets.

They were built for a simple reason: precision earns trust, and trust is what protects a brand’s next claim, next product and next piece of scrutiny.

What to do now

For brands already committed to responsible communication, EmpCo confirms good practice rather than disrupting it. Four things worth checking:

• Review every generic claim. Words like “green,” “eco-friendly” or “sustainable” need specific proof, or they need to go.
• Check any self-made label or symbol on your packaging. If it has never had independent certification behind it, now is the time to get that in place.
• Look closely at any “climate neutral” or “carbon neutral” claim. If it relies only on offsets rather than real reductions, it will not meet the new standard.
• Apply the same checks to anyone speaking for your brand, including influencers, since your brand stays responsible for what they say.

The wider point

EmpCo is a legal deadline, but it is worth seeing as something more useful than that.

It puts into law what trust-led brands already understood: a claim is only worth making if you can defend it to a customer, a retail buyer, and a regulator.

Brands that already work this way will barely notice the date pass. Brands that treated it as optional now have a deadline instead of a choice.

Be Recognised for Responsible Marketing and Communications

👉 Become a signatory of The Anti-Greenwash Charter.
Shape the future of responsible communication and show stakeholders what trusted sustainability leadership looks like.

Join the Charter →

Trust Is the Asset: How Purpose-Led Brands Are Building It Through Sustainability.

Trust is what brands need most, and sustainability communication is one of the best ways to build it. A new roundtable report from the Anti-Greenwash Charter brings together nine purpose-led brands, including COOK, Huel and Tony’s Chocolonely, to unpack what earns that trust, and what quietly erodes it.

Trust is becoming the thing brands need most.

In a market where customers are increasingly wary of overstated claims, sustainability communication has become one of the most effective ways to earn that trust, or lose it.

This summer, the Anti-Greenwash Charter brought together representatives from nine purpose-led consumer brands, including COOK, Huel, Riverford Organic and Tony’s Chocolonely, to explore what confident, evidence-based sustainability communication actually looks like in practice.

What came out of the room was not a set of new rules. It was a shared account of what earns belief.

Why sustainability carries so much weight

Every brand at the table was founded on the idea that reducing its impact matters. That makes the standard applied to its sustainability claims more than a technical detail. It becomes part of how the whole brand is judged. Get one claim wrong, and customers do not just question that claim. They start questioning the next one too, about quality, about ingredients, about anything the brand says.

Credibility does not sit in a separate compartment marked “environmental.” It travels.

The regulatory backdrop makes this more pressing, not less. The Competition and Markets Authority gained direct consumer-enforcement powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act in April 2025, and the EU’s Empowering Consumers Directive will restrict specific claim types, including vague terms like “eco-friendly” and offset-only carbon-neutral claims, from 27 September 2026.

But the room’s focus was not on the compliance floor. It was on the ceiling, the opportunity to build lasting trust with customers.

What builds it

Several practices came up again and again. A track record of responsible practice gives a brand room to correct a limited error without losing customer confidence, though that protection has limits. Precision does more work than breadth: a specific, product-level claim tied to a clearly defined boundary tends to hold up better under scrutiny than a broad percentage claim that only needs one exception to unravel.

The most striking theme was a willingness to disclose what is not yet fixed. Rather than waiting to be found out, several brands are proactively naming gaps in their own supply chains alongside the remediation underway. One participant explained the logic:

“Being open about the challenges we’re facing preempts reputational issues, rather than creating them.”

That kind of honesty does something a polished claim cannot. It shows the audience the brand can be trusted with the parts of the story that are still unresolved, not just the parts that are finished.

Where it gets fragile

The room was equally candid about where trust breaks down internally. Impact reports, ESG disclosures and certification data hold the evidence behind a claim, but that evidence has to survive translation into short, customer-facing language.

Participants described a recurring failure point: as material gets shortened for a brief or a headline, the scope and qualifications that made a claim defensible can quietly go missing.

The brands addressing this potential weakness well have closed that gap by bringing sustainability and marketing teams together from the start of the process, not at the handoff, so the evidence is built into the message rather than fitted around it afterwards.

A shared standard

Across on-pack communication, marketing and reporting, the practices described in the room map closely onto four familiar principles: transparency, accountability, fairness and honesty. A living claims policy that every voice speaking for the brand is briefed against. A two-pass review that checks accuracy before it checks tone.

A simple test applied before anything goes out: would this claim survive a conversation with a consumer, a retail buyer and a regulator, in that order.

None of this is about saying less for its own sake. It is about saying only what can be backed up, and being confident enough in the evidence to say it clearly.

The full roundtable report, including practice points and resources for each focus area, is available to download here.

Be Recognised for Responsible Marketing and Communications

👉 Become a signatory of The Anti-Greenwash Charter.
Shape the future of responsible communication and show stakeholders what trusted sustainability leadership looks like.

Join the Charter →

How The Anti-Greenwash Charter Safeguards Best Practice in Sustainability Communication

Certification is only as credible as the process that keeps testing it, here’s how the Charter ensures its signatories continue to meet the standard they signed up to.

Any independent standard is judged on more than how carefully it’s awarded in the first place. It’s judged on whether that standard is kept up afterwards.

This isn’t unique to the Anti-Greenwash Charter. B Corp, for example, requires companies to recertify regularly, and now includes independent checks as part of that process.

The idea is a simple one: a mark only means something if it keeps being tested, not if it’s handed out once and forgotten.

The Charter follows the same principle, using two processes built specifically for sustainability marketing and communications.

The Campaign Review

The main process is the Campaign Review. This is an independent check of a signatory’s marketing and communications, measured against their own Green Claims Policy.

Reviews happen every year.

Reviewers check whether claims are backed up by evidence, whether the right internal approval process was followed, whether staff understood the rules they were working to, and whether the language, images and data used were fair rather than misleading.

Every completed review is marked with a certificate (see example below), confirming it happened and what the result was.

Every report, whatever the result, is added to the signatory’s Green Claims Policy. Over time, this builds a running record, so anyone can see a signatory’s history of reviews, not just a single snapshot.

What happens when something’s wrong

Reviews can end in one of three ways: compliant, compliant with recommendations, or non-compliant. If a campaign is non-compliant, the signatory has to fix the issue straight away.

One non-compliant result doesn’t mean a signatory loses their status. It simply means the process has done its job: spotted a gap between a claim and the evidence for it, and required that gap to be closed.

Things change if the problem keeps happening.

Two non-compliant reviews in a row, or a serious breach of the standards, can lead to a signatory losing their status altogether.

This balance is intentional. It accepts that getting everything right first time, on a genuinely complicated subject, isn’t realistic. But it also means that if problems keep repeating, there are real consequences.

Checks from outside: the Share Concern process

Campaign Reviews happen on a set yearly schedule. The Share Concern process gives signatories a further opportunity to demonstrate the strength of their communications, open to anyone, at any time.

Anyone, a customer, a competitor, a member of the public, can raise a concern about a signatory’s communications directly with the Charter.

Signatories join the Charter because they are already committed to being fair, transparent and evidence-led communicators, so the process gives them a way to show that commitment holds up under scrutiny, not just to claim it.

Each concern is investigated properly, checked against the signatory’s own policy and the Charter’s standards, with extra evidence gathered where needed.

In 2026, the Charter received one such concern. Without going into the details of the case, a full investigation was carried out. It confirmed that the signatory hadn’t broken their own policy or gone against the Charter’s standards.

The investigation did identify some room for improvement, and recommended changes to strengthen their communication further.

This shows how the process is meant to work for our signatories, who take their commitment to responsible practice seriously. A concern doesn’t need to prove wrongdoing to be worth investigating properly, and being willing to be questioned, and to keep improving as a result, is itself a mark of the calibre of communicator that chooses to sign up to the Charter.

Why this matters

The Anti-Greenwash Charter isn’t a regulator and doesn’t claim any legal power. It’s an independent standard that organisations choose to sign up to, and that choice says something in itself. Signing up means being confident enough in your own communications to have them checked, repeatedly, by someone outside your organisation.

What makes that standard mean something is the work behind it: reviews every year, a visible record of results, clear consequences for repeated problems, and an open door for anyone to raise a concern.

Put together, this isn’t just paperwork. It’s what allows the Charter’s mark to stand for something important: proof that a signatory is a strong, confident communicator, and still meeting the standard today, not just when they first signed up.

Be Recognised for Responsible Marketing and Communications

👉 Become a signatory of The Anti-Greenwash Charter.
Shape the future of responsible communication and show stakeholders what trusted sustainability leadership looks like.

Join the Charter →

Getting Sustainability Back on the Agenda: Why Trust and Governance Are the Business Case

Sustainability has not left the boardroom agenda so much as gone quiet within it, caught between two unspoken questions: will this pay, and will this expose us.

Sustainability has quietly slipped down the agenda in many comms and marketing functions. Not because the underlying issues have gone away, but because two anxieties have taken their place: will this deliver a return, and will this expose us to risk. Until both are addressed directly, sustainability communication stays sidelined, however strong the underlying story.

The way back onto the agenda isn’t a louder pitch.

It’s reframing the conversation around the two things leadership actually weighs up: trust and governance.

The Return Question: Reframe It as Trust, Not Reputation

When sustainability comms gets deprioritised on return grounds, it’s usually because “return” has been defined too narrowly, as a short-term reputational or sales uplift that’s hard to prove and easy to challenge.

Trust is a better frame, because trust compounds. Edelman’s Trust Barometer has consistently shown that trust in an organisation directly shapes willingness to buy, work for, and defend that organisation. Most sustainability messaging is now treated with suspicion, which is exactly why credible communication stands out. Done well, it’s one of the few ways left to build trust at scale.

That’s the opportunity, not the obstacle. Most sustainability messaging is treated with suspicion, so communication that’s visibly verified stands out simply by being different. The return isn’t a campaign metric. It’s something more durable: being believed, at a time when belief itself is in short supply.

For sustainability leads making the case internally, this means shifting the pitch from “here’s the story we want to tell” to “here’s the trust deficit we can close, and here’s the evidence that closing it pays.”

The Risk Question: Reframe It as Governance, Not Exposure

The second anxiety, risk, tends to surface as a fear of getting it wrong: greenwashing accusations, regulatory scrutiny, social media backlash. The instinctive response is to say less, a pattern increasingly known as greenhush. But silence carries its own risk. It cedes the narrative to competitors, regulators, and critics, and it does nothing to fix the underlying practice.

The more useful reframe is governance. Risk isn’t inherent to sustainability communication; it’s inherent to sustainability communication that hasn’t been through proper process. That’s a solvable, familiar problem for any comms or marketing function, because it’s the same discipline applied to financial claims, legal claims, or product claims: verify before you publish, evidence what you assert, and be able to show your working if challenged.

Framed this way, the conversation moves from “should we talk about this at all” to “what’s our process for making sure what we say is defensible.”

That’s a question governance and risk teams already know how to answer, which makes it far easier to get their support rather than their resistance.

Independent Standards Do Both Jobs at Once

This is where an independent framework earns its place in the conversation. A body like The Anti-Greenwash Charter isn’t a regulator and doesn’t claim authority it doesn’t have. What it offers is validation: an external, credible check that content has been through a proper process before it’s published.

That validation works on both anxieties simultaneously. On trust, third-party verification is more persuasive than self-declaration, because audiences no longer take organisations at their word on sustainability.

On governance, an external standard gives internal risk and legal teams a structured process to point to, rather than asking them to trust marketing’s judgement alone.

Making the Case Internally

For sustainability leads trying to get this back on the agenda, the practical shift is this: stop pitching sustainability communication as a values exercise, and start pitching it as infrastructure. Trust infrastructure, because it’s the mechanism by which credibility is built and retained. Governance infrastructure, because it’s the mechanism by which claims are protected and defensible.

Neither of those framings asks leadership to take a leap of faith.

Both ask them to invest in something with a recognisable shape: a process that reduces exposure while building an asset that compounds.

That’s a case return-focused and risk-focused stakeholders can both say yes to, often in the same meeting.

Be Recognised for Responsible Marketing and Communications

👉 Become a signatory of The Anti-Greenwash Charter.
Shape the future of responsible communication and show stakeholders what trusted sustainability leadership looks like.

Join the Charter →