Last year, the European Commission (EC) and national EU consumer authorities conducted a screening of websites to investigate green claims across a host of industries, including cosmetics and fashion. Findings showed 42% of cases featured claims that were either exaggerated, false or deceptive and could potentially qualify as unfair commercial practices under EU rules.
The EC planned to come down hard on this via various tools under its wider European Green Deal announced at the end of 2019 but also a proposal announced more recently.
In March this year, the Commission announced a set of ways it planned to ‘make sustainable products the norm’, including a proposal for a regulation on eco-design for sustainable products to extend the existing eco-design framework and widen requirements around issues like durability, reusability and so on. Within the proposal, the Commission proposed use of ‘digital product passports’ for all regulated products on the EU market, to facilitate reparations, recycling and tracking of substances of concern.
Philippe Guguen, founder and CEO of French digital marketing agency Map Emulsion, said digital technologies certainly were a strong way forward to address ‘greenwashing’.
‘We want to supply secure information to the consumer’
“One out of two brands are not telling the truth. So, that’s greenwashing we want to stop, and we want to supply secure information to the consumer,” Guguen told attendees at the Sustainable Cosmetics Summit earlier this month in Paris, France.
Beyond the potential soon-to-be legal requirements for products in the EU, he said the need for secure sustainable information was timelier than ever also because of the ongoing climate crisis and burgeoning consumer demands around transparency.
“The new generation are asking for change, they are aware. The younger generation is asking us to move and to be transparent,” he said.
There was also an increasing need for transparency in…
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