By Allyson Bartlett
As Europe tightens the rules on environmental claims, brands have an opportunity to rise above green skepticism and earn evidence-backed trust.
For years, consumers have been asked to navigate a thicket of “green” claims, sweeping sustainability language and competing environmental promises. As of 27 September, 2026, Europe’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT) Directive changes the rules of that conversation. Generic claims such as “green” or “eco-friendly” face new restrictions, while sustainability labels must be based on qualifying certification schemes or established by public authorities.
The immediate effect is regulatory, but the cultural reset it enables—what consumers expect to see and what they’re prepared to believe—is the bigger story.
As VP of Brand & Marketing at 1% for the Planet, I see firsthand how much value companies find in communicating the progress they’re making on the environment. And it’s these brands—the ones with authentic commitments—that are poised to stand apart in a post-ECGT world. Because it’s a world in which sustainability storytelling must be specific, transparent and validated.
This change is a win-win: Consumers get the clarity they deserve and brands making real, verifiable impact get the competitive advantage they’ve earned.
Why has sustainability storytelling become so hard to trust?
The problem ECGT is trying to solve is bigger than a handful of misleading advertisements. It is the cumulative effect of years in which consumers have encountered environmental claims everywhere, but often had little means of distinguishing meaningful action from marketing language.
The European Commission has previously found that more than half of a sample of environmental claims across the EU provided vague, misleading or unfounded information. Its impact assessment helped establish the scale of the problem. More recently, its 2025 consumer data showed that environmental considerations in purchasing decisions had fallen to 43%, down 13 percentage points since 2022, with lack of trust in green claims identified as a factor. European Commission consumer data points to an uncomfortable truth: People cannot use sustainability information confidently if they do not believe it.
That does not mean consumers have stopped caring. Edelman’s 2025 research found that 55% of people globally are more likely to buy from a brand that acts on climate change. It also found that 53% assume a brand that stays silent on societal issues is doing nothing, or worse, hiding something. Edelman’s findings expose the bind many businesses have found themselves in: overclaim and lose credibility, or say nothing and risk being read as inactive.
ECGT offers a path out of that bind. By raising the evidential bar, it creates the conditions for environmental information to become more useful to consumers again.
What will consumers notice now?
Most consumers will never read the Directive and may never even know it exists. What matters is what they see at the point of decision-making. Over time, I expect three shifts to become visible:
- Fewer catch-all claims. Terms such as “green,” “sustainable,” and “eco-friendly” will be harder to use as shorthand without the recognized accountability needed to support them. More brands will need to explain exactly what they have done.
- Greater weight on credible labels. A logo can no longer simply be a badge a business has created for itself. Under ECGT, sustainability labels must meet defined conditions, including independent auditing for established certification schemes.
- More transparent information behind the claim. The smartest brands will treat the front-of-pack statement, website copy or campaign line as the beginning of the story rather than the whole story, making the evidence behind it easy to find and understand.
That last shift is especially important. Trust will not be rebuilt by replacing one set of approved words with another. It will come from the reassurance that claims are backed by evidence. A specific commitment, independently verified and clearly explained, gives a consumer something concrete to judge.
The Directive itself makes this distinction. It targets generic environmental claims that aren’t substantiated and prohibits sustainability labels that are neither based on a qualifying certification scheme nor established by public authorities.
Could tougher rules actually make brands more interesting?
There is a risk that some companies respond to the new landscape by retreating from environmental communication altogether. That may feel safer, particularly after several years of heightened scrutiny around greenwashing. But silence has its own consequences, and it would be a mistake to confuse compliance with caution.
The more fruitful opportunity for brands is to move from broad sustainability positioning to stronger, evidence-backed storytelling. In this, specificity becomes a superpower: the percentage of revenue committed to an environmental solution; the tons of material avoided; the hectares restored; the supplier practice changed; the external standard met; the year-on-year progress achieved and, importantly, the gaps that remain.
Third-party certification is one route to providing that credibility, because claims are stronger when a business is not marking its own homework.
In this new regulatory landscape, compliance will raise the floor for what’s expected of brands, but it will still be up to brands to determine how high they build above it.
What does the next era of sustainability storytelling look like?
For European businesses, the most useful shift may be to stop thinking of sustainability communication as a final marketing layer applied after the work has been done. Under this new regime, the evidence, governance and story have to connect from the start. Sustainability, legal and communications teams will increasingly need to work from the same set of facts.
That should change the questions asked inside organizations. Instead of “What can we say?,” the questions become: What have we actually done? How do we know? Who has verified it? Can a customer understand the claim without needing specialist knowledge? And can they find the evidence if they want to look further?
Those internal questions are useful far beyond ECGT. They encourage a form of brand storytelling that is more grounded, more accountable and ultimately more relatable to consumers, who value transparency and honesty over perfection.
Europe’s new rules should be seen as the beginning of a new trust standard, not the end of sustainability storytelling. If they work as intended, consumers will encounter less vague promises and more claims they can understand and verify. For brands, that creates a higher bar, but also a fairer one.
About the Author
Allyson Bartlett is VP of Brand & Marketing at 1% for the Planet, a global certifier that offers businesses a simple and compliant solution to drive environmental impact and build credibility through verified contributions to vetted environmental solutions.
References
- European Commission: Sustainable consumption and ECGT application date
- European Commission: Key consumer data
- Edelman: A Public Mandate for Environmental Leadership
