"Carbon Neutral" Is Now a Legal Risk | Green-Claims Cleanup Before 27 Sept

For years, "carbon neutral", "climate neutral" and "eco-friendly" were marketing words. From 27 September 2026 they become a compliance question with real legal consequences. On that date the EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive (the ECGT, or EmpCo, Directive 2024/825) starts to apply across the single market, and it applies without a transition period. Two recent court rulings — against Volvic in France and against Apple in Germany — show that regulators, consumer groups and judges are not waiting for the deadline. They are already treating vague and offset-based green claims as misleading commercial practices.

This article explains what is changing, what the two cases tell us about where the legal line now sits, why long-term emission compensation is the real crux of a credible neutrality claim, and how to run a structured cleanup of your claims in the roughly ten weeks that remain.

What changes on 27 September 2026

The ECGT Directive amends the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive. In practice it draws three hard lines around environmental marketing to consumers:

• Generic environmental claims — such as "eco-friendly", "green", "sustainable" or "kind to the environment" — are banned unless the underlying performance is recognised and can be demonstrated.
• Claims that an entire product or the whole business is climate or carbon neutral based on emission offsetting are prohibited. A company may still talk about its own emission reductions, but it can no longer lean on offsets to advertise a product as neutral.
• Self-created sustainability labels are banned unless they are based on a certification scheme or established by a public authority.

There is no grace period for stock already on shelves. National consumer protection authorities agreed a Common Understanding at the end of June 2026 on how they will enforce the rules, confirming that non-compliant packaging and point-of-sale material in circulation must be corrected — for example by over-stickering — rather than being allowed to sell through. Penalties are set nationally and can reach at least four percent of annual turnover in the Member States concerned.

Two courts just showed what "misleading" looks like

The direction of travel is not theoretical. In the past few weeks, two European courts have struck down high-profile neutrality claims, and in both cases the reasoning is a preview of how the ECGT will be enforced.

France: the Volvic ruling

A Paris court found that Danone's "carbon neutral" and recycling claims for its Volvic mineral water brand were misleading. The judgment, handed down in a case brought by the consumer association CLCV, awarded 75,000 euros in damages and — importantly — ordered publication of the decision, so the reputational cost travels far beyond the fine itself. Danone has said it will appeal. The case confirms that consumer associations, not only public authorities, can and will bring green-claims litigation.

Germany: the Apple Watch ruling

In August 2025 the Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main (Landgericht Frankfurt, case 3-06 O 8/24) ruled, in a suit brought by the environmental group Deutsche Umwelthilfe, that Apple could no longer advertise three Apple Watch models as a "CO2 neutral product". The court held that the claim was misleading under German competition law and set a penalty of up to 250,000 euros per infringement. The judgment is not yet final and Apple may appeal to the Higher Regional Court.

The court's reasoning is the part worth reading closely. Apple's neutrality claim relied on carbon credits from a forestry project planting eucalyptus in Paraguay. The judges found that roughly three quarters of the project area sits on leased land whose leases run out in 2029, with no secured guarantee that the trees — and therefore the stored carbon — would remain in place after that. In the court's words, there was no secure prospect for the continuation of the forest project. Because the carbon dioxide a product emits stays in the atmosphere for a very long time, offsetting that ends in 2029 cannot honestly back a promise of neutrality. The court effectively held that a credible neutrality claim requires the compensation to be guaranteed over the long run.

Why long-term emission compensation is the crux

Both rulings turn on the same idea, and it is the single most important concept to understand before cleaning up your own claims: for an offset to genuinely cancel out an emission, the carbon it stores has to stay stored for as long as the emitted carbon stays in the atmosphere. That is not a marketing nuance — it is basic climate accounting.

Emissions and removals live on different clocks

A tonne of carbon dioxide released today continues to warm the planet for centuries; a meaningful share is still in the atmosphere hundreds of years later. To truly balance that tonne, the corresponding removal must be equally durable. A forestry lease that expires in 2029, or a plantation that may be harvested, burned or cleared, offers storage measured in years — while the emission it is meant to offset persists for generations. The two do not cancel out, and that mismatch is exactly what the Frankfurt court identified.

Permanence, additionality and reversal risk

Regulators and standard-setters now expect three things from any offset used to support a neutrality claim:

• Permanence — the carbon must be locked away for the long term, ideally with a defined guarantee period and buffer reserves to cover losses. Storage that can lapse when a land lease ends is not permanent.
 • Additionality — the removal or reduction must be something that would not have happened anyway, so it represents a genuine extra tonne taken out of the atmosphere.
• Reversal management — there must be a credible plan and financial buffer for the risk that stored carbon is released again through fire, disease, harvesting or deforestation.

When any of these is missing, the offset is temporary or uncertain, and a "neutral" claim built on it is misleading. This is why the ECGT does not merely ask companies to substantiate offset-based neutrality claims better; it removes them from consumer marketing altogether. The lesson is not "buy better offsets and keep saying neutral" — it is that product-level neutrality claims to consumers are no longer a safe marketing route, and genuine sustainability progress has to be told through verifiable reductions in your own footprint.

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The 10-week green-claims cleanup

With roughly ten weeks until 27 September, the work is manageable if it is structured. The sequence below moves from discovery to remediation to governance.

Weeks 1–2: Inventory every claim

Catalogue all environmental claims across packaging, websites, product pages, ads, social media, in-store material and sales decks. Flag anything using "neutral", "eco", "green", "sustainable" or a self-made label.

Weeks 3–4: Triage by risk

Sort claims into three buckets: prohibited (offset-based neutrality, generic terms, unverified self-labels), fixable (needs qualification or evidence), and defensible (specific, substantiated, verifiable)

Weeks 4–6: rewrite and substantiate

Replace offset-based neutrality claims with specific, evidenced statements about your own emission reductions. Attach the supporting data, methodology and scope to every retained claim.

Weeks 6–8: Fix physical stock

Plan corrective action for packaging and point-of-sale material already in circulation — over-stickering, reprints or removal — since there is no sell-through grace period.

Weeks 8–10: Update systems and train

Refresh brand guidelines, brief marketing and agencies, update product data feeds, and set a sign-off gate so no new environmental claim ships without evidence.

Ongoing: Govern

Assign clear ownership for green claims, keep an evidence file for each claim, and monitor guidance from national authorities and the forthcoming Green Claims regime.

What good looks like after 27 September

The companies that come through this well will not go quiet on sustainability — they will get specific. Instead of "carbon neutral", they will say how much they have cut, over what baseline and scope, verified by whom. Instead of a self-designed leaf logo, they will use a recognised certification. Instead of leaning on a plantation lease that expires in 2029, they will describe durable, additional action with an honest account of what is not yet solved. Specific and modest beats sweeping and unprovable — legally and in the eyes of increasingly sceptical consumers.