EmpCo Directive: What Manufacturers Can Still Claim from 27 September 2026
The EmpCo directive applies across the EU from 27 September 2026. It bans generic green claims, offset-based carbon neutrality claims and sustainability labels without independent certification. Specific, evidence-backed claims about a named aspect of a product still stand. The change is less a marketing problem than a data problem, and B2B suppliers are more exposed than the scope suggests.
If your packaging says "carbon neutral" and that figure rests on offsets bought outside your value chain, the EmpCo directive makes that claim unlawful in the EU from 27 September 2026. Not discouraged. Unlawful, as a per se unfair commercial practice, with fines set at a maximum of at least 4% of annual turnover in the member state concerned under the CPC Regulation that governs how EmpCo fines are set.
Most coverage stops at the ban, which leaves the more useful question unanswered. Environmental claims are commercial assets that win tenders and justify price premiums. The question worth answering is not what you must delete, but what you can still say, and what evidence it takes to say it.
What the EmpCo directive changes on 27 September 2026
From that date, national laws implementing Directive (EU) 2024/825 apply to traders across all 27 member states. There is no additional transition period, no exemption for small businesses, and the rules reach packaging already sitting on shelves.
Member states had until 27 March 2026 to write the directive into national law, though 20 of them missed that deadline as of late May 2026. Late transposition creates no grace period. Germany moved early, implementing EmpCo through amendments to the Act against Unfair Competition in December 2025.
One clarification, because the two get conflated constantly. EmpCo is the EU's binding rulebook on greenwashing, and it is not the Green Claims Directive. That was a separate proposal adding pre-market verification, and the Commission announced its withdrawal in June 2025. Its collapse changed nothing about EmpCo, which was already law.
Scope matters here. EmpCo governs business-to-consumer communication, and reaches any trader marketing to EU consumers regardless of where it is based. A UK or US manufacturer selling into the EU is covered.
Which claims EmpCo bans outright
The directive adds four practices to the blacklist of per se unfair commercial practices, so each fails automatically with no case-by-case defence.
The offsetting ban is the sharpest break with current practice. Reduction and compensation are different things, and a consumer reading a label cannot be expected to tell them apart. You can still reference an offsetting programme. You cannot build a neutrality claim on it.
Why EmpCo exposes B2B suppliers more, not less
Pure business-to-business communication falls outside EmpCo's scope. Read quickly, that looks like an exemption. It is not, for three reasons, and this is where most coverage stops short.
Your claim stops working downstream. If you sell climate-neutral aluminium, resin or components on an offsetting basis, your customer cannot carry that claim onto consumer packaging after 27 September. The attribute you charged a premium for loses its purpose overnight. The claim does not just become non-compliant for them. It becomes worthless to you.
Your customer's liability arrives as your data request. Brand owners now need value-chain evidence to defend anything they print, and they will get it through supplier contracts, questionnaires and specifications. A supplier who answers with an industry average has handed their customer an indefensible claim, and increasingly a contractual exposure of their own.
Many industrial manufacturers are the brand owner. A sanitary fittings maker, a lighting manufacturer, a toy producer. Consumer goods manufacturers put claims in front of consumers directly and sit squarely in scope.
For a B2B supplier, then, EmpCo is a revenue question before it is a compliance question. Environmental performance stays sellable. The offset shortcut does not.
What you can still claim, and what proving it requires
Specific, substantiated claims about one clearly named aspect of a product remain permitted. So do lifecycle-based claims backed by solid evidence, and forward-looking targets supported by a documented plan and independent verification. The category that disappears is the vague or compensated claim.
That is the route back to environmental marketing, and it is narrower than what came before. "Climate neutral bottle" is gone. A named, measured change to one attribute is not.
Ravensburger offers the shape of it. Working with carbmee, the company cut packaging carbon emissions by 80% by switching from shrink wrap to plastic labels, and modelled bioplastic against conventional plastic to inform the design decision. That is a specific claim about one named aspect of a product, traceable to a material change and a product carbon footprint that supports it.
Holding up means four things. A defined system boundary. Primary supplier data rather than sector averages. A method a third party can reproduce. And recalculation when inputs change, because a claim substantiated in September breaks the moment a supplier, material or route changes.
If you sell into the UK, a second regime applies
EmpCo does not extend to the UK, which has moved separately rather than following the EU's model. Manufacturers selling into both markets face two divergent rulebooks.
The UK regime rests on general consumer protection law, now consolidated in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, alongside the CMA's Green Claims Code. Under the DMCC, in force since April 2025, the CMA can fine businesses directly up to £300,000 or 10% of global turnover, whichever is higher, without going to court. That ceiling sits above EmpCo's.
The development that matters for supply chains came on 22 January 2026, when the CMA published guidance on green claims across the supply chain. It confirms that businesses carry legal responsibility for misleading environmental claims made anywhere in their supply chain, not only for claims they make themselves. Where the EU sets explicit bans, the UK applies broad prohibitions case by case, so a claim can clear one regime and fail the other.
Where defensible evidence comes from
Both regimes now ask the same underlying question. Can you show, on demand, how a number was produced and from what.
Survey-based supplier data and spend-based averages will not answer it. Neither will an annual life cycle assessment from a consultancy, because it describes a moment that has passed by the time the claim reaches a shelf. What answers it is product-level carbon data built from transactional sources: ERP records, bills of material, procurement data and supplier-specific figures, at the granularity of the claim itself.
ZEISS shows what that looks like at scale. The company built 90 cradle-to-gate product carbon footprints from 12 foundational component models, covering more than 200 components across more than 50 suppliers, rather than applying a sector average to each line.
That is what carbmee EIS™ is built for. carbmee does not sell EmpCo compliance, and no software makes a claim lawful. Legal sign-off stays with your counsel. What a transactional data foundation does is produce product carbon footprints that update as your value chain changes, which separates a claim you can defend once from one you can defend continuously.
What to change before 27 September
Three things to take from this. EmpCo applies from 27 September 2026 with no transition period, and reaches non-EU traders selling to EU consumers. Offset-based neutrality claims and generic green language are finished, while specific, evidence-backed claims about a named attribute remain available. And B2B suppliers carry real exposure, because their own claims stop working downstream and their customers' liability arrives as a data request.
The companies that come out ahead are the ones that can still say something credible in October. That requires product-level evidence, and building it takes longer than the calendar allows for a standing start.
Talk to carbmee and review which of your product claims survive 27 September, and which rest on evidence you cannot yet produce.
