EU Commission Formally Withdraws Green Claims Directive

The European Commission officially withdrew the Green Claims Directive on Wednesday, killing a proposed regulation that would have forced companies to independently verify voluntary environmental claims before putting them on products or labels.

The withdrawal came with the release of the Commission's 2027 work programme. It ends a legislative process that effectively froze in June 2025 and, by the Commission's own account, never had a realistic path back.

Why did the directive die?

The numbers behind greenwashing drove the original proposal. When the Commission tabled the directive in March 2023, it cited studies finding that more than half of green claims made by companies in the EU were vague or misleading, and 40% were completely unsubstantiated.

The proposed rules would have set minimum requirements for businesses to substantiate, communicate and verify green claims. Companies would have had to back voluntary environmental claims with independent verification and scientific evidence. The directive also targeted private environmental labels, requiring them to be reliable, transparent, independently verified and regularly reviewed — and allowing new labels only if developed at EU level and approved only if they demonstrated greater environmental ambition than existing schemes.

The file stalled politically. The European People's Party (EPP), the largest party in the European Parliament, sent a letter in 2025 asking the Commission to "reconsiders and ultimately withdraw" the directive. The EPP argued the rules would be overly burdensome and complex, clashing with the EU's parallel push to simplify compliance for companies, and would disproportionately hit small businesses.

That small-company rationale drew pushback at the time. Commentators noted that lawmakers had already agreed to remove microenterprises from the directive's scope during negotiations.

The Commission's own timeline, laid out in the 2027 work programme, tells the rest:

• The file had been pending with co-legislators for more than three years.
• The Council failed to agree on a negotiating mandate in June 2024.
• Attempts by the Council presidency in 2025 to advance discussions did not succeed, and the Commission judged the file "unlikely to secure support in the Council within a reasonable timeframe."

What survives from the original package?

The Green Claims Directive was one piece of a consumer-focused environmental and circular economy package. Two of its companions live on.

The ecodesign regulation enables the adoption of environmental sustainability requirements across a wide range of products. The Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT), which targets deceptive sustainability-related marketing, has entered into force — meaning companies still face binding anti-greenwashing rules on generic environmental claims, even as the stricter substantiation regime for specific claims is gone.

How did the withdrawal actually unfold?

The June 2025 pause came after two trilogue meetings between the Commission, Parliament and Council. At a press conference following the EPP letter, a Commission spokesperson said: "the Commission intends to withdraw the Green Claims proposal."

A subsequent statement to ESG Today added a condition: the Commission had not yet withdrawn the file, but intended to if microenterprises were not exempted from the proposal's scope. With the 2027 work programme, that intention became final.

For companies making environmental claims in the EU market, the substantive verification and labelling requirements in the Green Claims Directive are off the table. What happens next runs through the ECGT's enforcement and any future Commission attempt to revisit claim substantiation — with no replacement proposal currently on the table.