Directive 2024/825 - Amendment of Directives 2005/29/EC and 2011/83/EU as regards empowering consumers for the green transition through better protection against unfair practices and through better information - Main contents

Official Journal

of the European Union

EN

Series L

2024/825

6.3.2024

In order to contribute to the proper functioning of the internal market, based on a high level of consumer protection and environmental protection, and to make progress in the green transition, it is essential that consumers can make informed purchasing decisions and thus contribute to more sustainable consumption patterns. That implies that traders have a responsibility to provide clear, relevant and reliable information. Therefore, specific rules should be introduced in Union consumer law to tackle unfair commercial practices that mislead consumers and prevent them from making sustainable consumption choices, such as practices associated with the early obsolescence of goods, misleading environmental claims (‘greenwashing’), misleading information about the social characteristics of products or traders’ businesses, or non-transparent and non-credible sustainability labels. Those rules will enable competent national bodies to effectively address such practices. Ensuring that environmental claims are fair, understandable and reliable will allow traders to operate on a level playing field and will enable consumers to choose products that are genuinely better for the environment than competing products. This will encourage competition leading to more environmentally sustainable products, thereby reducing the negative impact on the environment.

Those new rules should be introduced through amending Articles 6 and 7 of Directive 2005/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council (3) with regard to commercial practices that are considered to be misleading, and therefore prohibited, on the basis of a case-by-case assessment, and through amending Annex I to Directive 2005/29/EC, with the addition of specific misleading practices which are in all circumstances considered unfair, and therefore prohibited. As already laid down in Directive 2005/29/EC, it should still be possible to consider that a commercial practice is unfair on the basis of Articles 5 to 9 of that Directive, even though that particular practice is not listed as an unfair commercial practice in Annex I to Directive 2005/29/EC.

In order for consumers to be empowered to take better-informed decisions and thus stimulate the demand for, and the supply of, more sustainable goods, they should not be misled about a product’s environmental or social characteristics or circularity aspects, such as durability, reparability or recyclability, through the overall presentation of a product. Article 6(1) of Directive 2005/29/EC should therefore be amended by adding environmental and social characteristics and circularity aspects to the list of the main characteristics of a product in respect of which a trader’s practices can be considered misleading, following a case-by-case assessment. Information provided by traders on the social characteristics of a product throughout its value chain can relate, for example, to the quality and fairness of working conditions of the workforce involved, such as adequate wages,...