Green Claims Directive withdrawn in June 2025: legislative failure and consequences for textiles under ECGT

Chronology — proposal 22 Mar 2023 → trilogue 28 Jan 2025 → Council cancellation 23 Jun 2025

On 22 Mar 2023, the European Commission adopted the Proposal for a Directive on the substantiation and communication of explicit environmental claims, catalogued under file COM(2023) 166 final. This rule, known in the doctrine and in the Community acquis as the «Green Claims Directive» (GCD), was born with the mandate to establish a harmonised framework, as lex specialis, to tackle the proliferation of greenwashing and disinformation in the internal market. The original text required rigorous scientific substantiation based on the life cycle of products and, capitally, introduced a mechanism of ex ante verification by an independent third party before the marketing of any product bearing an environmental claim.

The ordinary legislative procedure (2023/0085(COD)) began its parliamentary journey with the joint assignment to the committees on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI) and on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO). After an intense period of amendments, the report of the joint committees was approved on 14 February 2024. The European Parliament adopted its first-reading position on 12 March 2024, with a resounding backing of 467 votes in favour, 65 against and 74 abstentions. The parliamentary position maintained the rigour of the ex ante verification, although it introduced nuances on the compensation of residual emissions compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5°C. For its part, the Council of the European Union reached a general approach on 17 June 2024, in which a will to procedurally simplify certain explicit claims of lesser complexity was already glimpsed, exempting them from the full assessment or strict third-party verification.

Following the constitution of the new parliamentary legislature, on 4 December 2024 the joint committees voted in favour of initiating the interinstitutional negotiations. The first trilogue was held on 28 Jan 2025, establishing the mandates for the work at technical level. A second meeting took place on 24 April 2025, focusing the discussions on the regulation of labels, consumer information and the ever-thorny regime of access to justice and sanctions. However, the legislative architecture collapsed in the final stretch. On 18 June 2025, an official missive from the majority parliamentary group triggered the crisis. On 20 June 2025, the European Commission announced its intention to withdraw the proposal. As a direct consequence, the Council unilaterally cancelled on 23 Jun 2025 the third and definitive trilogue. The formal withdrawal by the Commission materialised in Jun 2025, extinguishing the file and leaving a specific regulatory vacuum on the matter.

Reasons for the legislative failure — EPP withdrawal of support + Italy + microenterprises + industrial lobby

The demise of Proposal COM(2023) 166 does not obey a procedural accident, but a head-on collision between the environmental ambition of the European Green Deal and the macroeconomic pressures framed in the new doctrine of industrial competitiveness. The immediate catalyst of the withdrawal was the intervention of the European People's Party (EPP). In its letter of 18 June 2025 addressed to the Commissioner for the Environment, the EPP shadow rapporteurs demanded the withdrawal of the text, arguing that the required procedures were «excessively complex, administratively burdensome and costly». The insurmountable friction point lay in Article 10 of the proposal, which imposed the principle of ex ante verification. The obligation to submit any environmental claim to certification by an accredited third-party body was considered incompatible with the new paradigm of administrative simplification.

This political turn was founded on the doctrine emanating from the Draghi Report on European competitiveness, which recommended a 25% reduction in administrative burdens for the business fabric. In this context, the general package of simplification measures, known as «Omnibus», designed to rationalise the EU's sustainability regulatory frameworks, clashed head-on with the requirements of the GCD. The requirement to obtain a certificate of conformity recognised throughout the Union before issuing a commercial communication was perceived as a brake on the agility of the market.

At the level of the Member States, the opposition of industrial powers, with Italy articulating the most systematic rejection within the Council, proved decisive. The Italian manufacturing industry, backed by an intense lobby of the European business confederations, argued that the compliance costs derived from life-cycle analysis and ex ante certification would erode the global competitiveness of the European production sector. The estimated cost of substantiating complex claims, which the Commission itself calculated at between EUR 8,000 and 54,000 depending on the magnitude of the claim and the existence of sectoral environmental-footprint rules, was wielded as an unbearable barrier to entry.

Particularly controversial was the architecture designed for small corporations. Article 3(3) of the Proposal established that microenterprises —those with fewer than 10 employees and an annual turnover below EUR 2 million— would be exempt from the substantiation requirements, unless they voluntarily requested the certificate of conformity. The industrial lobby and the SME associations demonstrated that this exemption was a chimera in commercial practice. In integrated value chains, especially in sectors of high production fragmentation, the large purchasing brands would inexorably require ex ante certification from their smallest suppliers in order to be able to issue their own environmental claims on the final product. This indirect outsourcing of the bureaucratic burden towards the base of the supply chain consolidated the patronal and political rejection that culminated in the withdrawal of Jun 2025.

What textiles lose — mandatory third-party verification + harmonised methodology + sanctions

The withdrawal of Proposal COM(2023) 166 entails the amputation of the most ambitious tool of positive integration designed for the sustainable-consumption market. For the European textile sector, characterised by a high exposure to reputational pressure and a historical opacity in the origin of raw materials, the loss of the Green Claims Directive eliminates three fundamental pillars that would have radically reconfigured the rules of the competitive game.

In the first place, the requirement of mandatory and ex ante third-party verification lapses. Article 10 of the proposal established a strict procedure by which no claim («made with 50% recycled polyester», «cotton grown with reduced impact») could be published without the favourable opinion of a verifier accredited in accordance with Regulation (EC) 765/2008 (Article 11). This verifier had to issue a certificate of conformity that endowed the brand with a passport of presumption of legality in the 27 Member States. With the disappearance of this mechanism, textile brands lose the legal certainty that a single official certification granted; the protective shield against the disparate inspections of the national consumer authorities disappears.

In the second place, the creation of a harmonised methodology based on the environmental footprint is aborted. Although the Commission discarded imposing the Product Environmental Footprint method (PEF) as the sole standard —acknowledging in Recital 32 that, in the specific case of textiles, the release of microplastics still lacked a fully integrated impact-assessment methodology—, Article 3(4) empowered the Commission to adopt delegated acts. These acts would have set specific rules based on the life cycle to substantiate claims in the textile sector. Their disappearance condemns the industry to depend on fragmented standards, private certifications of disparate rigour and proprietary methodologies that will lack the presumption of legal validity at Community scale.

In the third place, the textile sector is spared an extremely harsh regime of harmonised sanctions, but loses the deterrent effect against unfair competition. Article 17 of the proposal obliged the Member States to impose fines that effectively confiscated the economic benefits derived from greenwashing. For widespread infringements at Union level, the rule fixed a maximum fine equivalent to at least 4% of the trader's annual turnover in the affected States. Likewise, it empowered the authorities to seize the income obtained from the transactions of products with false claims and to establish exclusions of up to twelve months from public-procurement processes. The evaporation of this Article 17 returns the sanctioning regime to the discretion of the national consumer codes, weakening the punitive threat for the infringing corporations that operate through complex cross-border engineering.

What remains — ECGT Dir 2024/825 Annex I prohibitions + DGCCRF/AGCM/NCA case law

Faced with the collapse of the GCD as lex specialis, the burden of controlling greenwashing falls entirely on Directive (EU) 2024/825, known as Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT). Adopted on 28 February 2024 and with a transposition deadline for its application of 27 Sep 2026, the ECGT amends Directive 2005/29/EC on unfair commercial practices, operating as a lex generalis of negative integration: it does not prescribe how a claim must be technically substantiated, but rather strictly prohibits certain misleading practices.

The hard core of the ECGT applicable to textiles lies in the additions to Annex I of Directive 2005/29/EC, which establishes the blacklist of practices prohibited in all circumstances, without the need for a case-by-case assessment. The new point 4a prohibits making generic environmental claims (such as «eco», «green», «environmentally friendly», «sustainable») when the trader cannot demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to the claim. The text links this excellent performance to the possession of the EU Ecolabel under Regulation (EC) 66/2010 or to officially recognised EN ISO 14024 type I labelling systems. Point 2a prohibits displaying sustainability labels that are not based on a certification system or have not been established by public authorities, de facto banishing self-designed logos without external audit. Point 4b penalises making a claim about the entire product when it only concerns a specific aspect (for example, claiming that a garment is recycled when only the packaging is). Critically, point 4c prohibits claiming, based on emissions compensation, that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive impact on the climate («carbon neutral»), directly attacking the purchase of forestry credits to whitewash the industrial footprint.

Without the methodological guidelines of the GCD, the interpretation of what constitutes a misleading practice within the framework of Article 6 of the amended Directive 2005/29/EC will fall entirely on the national competition and consumer authorities. Recent administrative case law draws an implacable horizon. The investigations of the Directorate-General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) in France and the Competition and Market Authority (AGCM) in Italy have set severe punitive precedents against fast-fashion giants. The resolutions against ultra-fast-fashion platforms have cemented the principle that opacity in the traceability of the supply chain is equivalent to a misleading omission. Likewise, the Norwegian Consumer Authority (NCA) has executed restrictive opinions against the use of the Higg MSI index by textile corporations, establishing that averaging global data without specificity of the production lot misleads the consumer in transactional decision-making. This case law, lacking the harmonising counterweight of the GCD, will be the de facto interpretative rule of the ECGT from 2026.

National divergence risk — France (Loi AGEC), Netherlands, Germany

The main warning formulated in Recital 4 of the ill-fated COM(2023) 166 —to avoid the fragmentation of the market caused by divergent national approaches— now materialises as the main regulatory risk for the European textile industry. The nature of Directive 2024/825 ECGT, being a harmonisation rule based on broad prohibitive principles, grants the Member States ample room for manoeuvre in its transposition, interpretation and enforcement.

The French Republic leads this movement of regulatory asymmetry. Through the «Loi AGEC» (Law against Waste and for a Circular Economy) and Decree 2022-748 on consumer information relating to the environmental qualities and characteristics, France imposes obligations of geographic traceability of the weaving, dyeing and garment-making phases that exceed the Community framework. Additionally, the French legal order explicitly prohibits the use in labelling of terms such as «biodegradable», «environmentally friendly» or equivalents, applying a lexicological rigidity that admits no modulations by life-cycle analysis.

In the Netherlands, the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) has published and enforced its own Guidelines on Sustainability Claims. The ACM has developed a doctrinal framework that requires any claim about the use of organic cotton or recycled polyester in garments to indicate the exact percentage on the main label itself, prohibiting the generic formulations that oblige the consumer to seek the information in QR codes or external websites to verify the materiality of the claim. The Dutch authority has forced legally binding commitments from sporting and fashion multinationals under the threat of coercive fines for the use of imprecise descriptors in supposedly sustainable capsule collections.

In Germany, the control of greenwashing is exercised predominantly through the Act against Unfair Competition (UWG) and the activism of associations such as the Wettbewerbszentrale, which initiate civil litigation to obtain injunctions against misleading marketing. The German regional courts are building a parallel and very demanding case law on the burden of proof that a textile manufacturer must bear when using terms such as «climate neutral». Without the European methodological umbrella that the Green Claims Directive would have provided, a Spanish or Portuguese textile brand will face the risk that a communication campaign valid in the eyes of the consumer authority of Madrid is sanctioned in Paris, blocked by the ACM in Amsterdam or precautionarily paralysed by a court in Munich. The internal market fractures into twenty-seven distinct evidentiary regimes.

Analytical reflection — post-GCD case-law fragmentation

The formal withdrawal of the Green Claims Directive in Jun 2025 certifies the temporary triumph of bureaucratic-simplification policies over the mechanisms of ex ante technical harmonisation. However, for the professionals of compliance, sustainability and financial management of the European textile sector, the annulment of file COM(2023) 166 does not represent a deregulation, but a mutation of legal risk. There is a transition from a pre-marketing compliance model, based on obtaining certificates of conformity through technical audits, to a highly punitive and unpredictable post-marketing enforcement model, governed by Directive 2024/825 (ECGT) from 27 Sep 2026.

The architecture of the ECGT, by integrating absolute prohibitions into Annex I of the Directive on unfair commercial practices, shifts the regulatory centre of gravity towards the national authorities and the courts of justice. In this ecosystem, the corporate defence will require the construction of internal forensic files of maximum solidity to withstand the materiality tests and the reversal of the burden of proof in the civil and administrative courts. The claim of ecological characteristics without the substrate of recognised certifications (such as GOTS, OEKO-TEX or the Textile Exchange standards) will automatically constitute a prohibited practice.

The risk map requires an immediate update of the compliance manuals. The joint reading of Pillar 5 ECGT — Textile Green Claims defines the contours of what is considered misleading material information by omission with respect to the reparability and durability of the garment. Likewise, the forensic analysis of the Shein criminal settlement EUR 40M DGCCRF France + EUR 1M AGCM Italy-textil-europeo) demonstrates the will of the Member States to intervene ex officio against the digital platforms that employ manipulative decision architectures to exaggerate the climate benefits. In a convergent doctrinal line, the 2022 Norway NCA resolution vs H&M+Norrøna on the Higg MSI index warns categorically that the use of aggregated secondary data that does not reflect the real primary impact of the specific supply chain of the marketed garment will be pursued by the public authority. Case-law fragmentation is the new European standard; asymmetric documentary compliance, the only strategy of operational survival.