Good News!

You Are Not Alone In Your Fight

Putting a lot of effort on a daily basis to minimize our carbon footprint while the world around us seems to collapse can feel futile and demotivating sometimes. While individual efforts are essential, significant change for our environmental problems requires the support of governments. In this blog, we share some good news to highlight the EU's efforts in combating climate change, including actions to address corporations and measures to safeguard citizens from greenwashing.

EU Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles

The EU launched this strategy in 2022 and proposed various regulations that are being implemented gradually and are expected to come into effect by 2030. 

Here are some key aspects of the strategy:

Ending fast fashion: The European Parliament called for measures to discourage the "fast fashion" model, including a clear definition based on high-volume, low-priced, low-quality garments.

Promoting sustainability: The strategy emphasizes making clothes more durable, repairable, and recyclable. This aims to encourage a circular economy, where resources are used efficiently and waste is minimized.

Ensuring responsible production: Regulations are planned to ensure that production respects human rights, social and labeling rights, animal welfare, and the environment throughout the supply chain.

Consumer transparency: Consumers are expected to receive clearer information about the environmental and social impact of clothing, allowing them to make more informed choices.

What is circular economy?

According to the definition of the European Parliament, circular economy is a shift from the traditional, linear economic model, which is based on a take-make-consume-throw away pattern. Circular economy is a model of production and consumption, which involves sharing, leasing, reusing, repairing, refurbishing and recycling existing materials and products as long as possible. In this way, the life cycle of products is extended.

Greenwashing Directive

This year January, the European Parliament has given its final green light to a directive that will improve product labeling and ban the use of misleading environmental claims. 🥳🥳🥳 

What is Greenwashing?

Misleading the public to believe that a company or other entity is doing more to protect the environment than it is, greenwashing promotes false solutions to the climate crisis that distracts from and delay concrete and credible action.

For example, emphasizing a single environmental attribute while ignoring other impacts, or claiming to be on track to reduce a company’s polluting emissions to net zero when no credible plan is actually in place.

What is the EU Ecolabel?

It was launched more than 30 years ago to promote goods and services that clearly demonstrate environmental excellence, based on standardized processes and scientific evidence. Independent experts help to verify that EU Ecolabel products use sustainable ingredients and avoid hazardous, toxic or otherwise harmful substances. Successful applicants also prove they use minimal, recycled and/or easily to recycle packaging. 

More accurate and reliable advertising: The new rules aim to improve product labeling by banning vague environmental claims like "environmentally friendly" and "natural" without evidence. Sustainability labels will be regulated, allowing only those based on official certification or established by public authorities in the EU, such as the EU Ecolabel. Claims about a product having a neutral or positive environmental impact due to emissions offsetting schemes will also be prohibited.

Durability in focus: The new law aims to encourage both producers and consumers to prioritize product durability. It will increase the visibility of guarantee information and introduce a new label highlighting products with longer guarantee periods. Additionally, the rules will prevent false claims about durability, premature replacement prompts for consumables like printer ink, and deceptive labeling of products as repairable when they're not. However, a critic of the new law is that there are no further obligations to make products more long-lasting or repairable. 

The law also fails to ban early obsolescence, the business practice of intentionally limiting the lifetime of a product to encourage replacement purchases. While it will be forbidden for traders to advertise faulty products to consumers, this will only apply if they are aware of the problem: a condition that will be difficult to prove in practice.


The directive now also needs to receive final approval from the Council, after which it will be published in the Official Journal and member states will have 24 months to transpose it into national law.

Conclusion

While these are essential steps taken by the EU, further actions are necessary, as well as those taken by individual states. Hopefully, reading this blog has made you more aware of the EU's actions to address these issues and helped you better understand how to recognize and avoid greenwashing.

Author: Katalin Miklós, Community and Civil Development Studies MA student at the ELTE, Budapest & intern of Youth Bridges Budapest

This blogpost was created in the framework of Feel Good project (2022-1-PL01-KA220-YOU-000086018).