How to make stronger sustainability claims

This explainer is written by our senior strategy consultant and ECGT expert, Eva Schouten.

In an era of greenwashing concerns and increasingly strict regulations, communicating sustainability to consumers requires careful consideration. The EU’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT or EmpCo) Directive sets clearer requirements for environmental claims. By keeping track of your claims, establishing a clear communication framework and backing up every claim with evidence, you can share accurate, honest information about your products and services with confidence.

Here are four tips to help you get it right.

Greenwashing happens when organisations exaggerate their sustainability efforts, make claims without sufficient evidence or communicate misleading information. But good sustainability communication is about much more than promoting your achievements. It’s about helping people understand the issues and make more sustainable choices.

Brands with a strong purpose can raise awareness, challenge established behaviours and inspire both consumers and businesses to act. Take Ariel’s ‘Turn to 30’ campaign, which encouraged people to wash their clothes at lower temperatures, or Dopper, which promotes drinking tap water from reusable bottles.

These examples show how campaigns and product communication can help influence everyday behaviour, particularly when brands are part of people’s daily lives.

Communicating sustainability isn’t always straightforward. Sustainability covers a wide range of topics, from CO₂ emissions and circularity to working conditions and biodiversity. And the way you communicate matters. Words create expectations, claims need evidence and misunderstandings can arise easily.

In 2024, only half of European consumers believed that most environmental claims were reliable, down from 61% in 2020. According to the European Commission’s Consumer Conditions Scoreboard 2025, 62% of consumers felt that information about environmental claims was not always trustworthy, while the same percentage found it confusing to identify which products and services were genuinely more environmentally friendly.

These findings highlight the importance of communicating honestly, providing sufficient evidence and keeping your message clear and easy to understand. They also help explain why sustainability communication is subject to increasingly specific requirements, including those set out in the EU’s ECGT Directive.

Is your sustainability communication subject to regulation? If you’re making environmental claims about a product, brand or organisation, the answer is likely to be yes.

An environmental claim is any message or representation that states or implies that a product, brand or business has a positive, reduced or less harmful impact on the environment. This can take many forms: written statements, logos, brand names, product names, symbols or images.

For many organisations, these messages appear across different channels and are created by different teams. From corporate websites and social media to product packaging and marketing materials, often in multiple languages.

Since 27 September 2026, the EU’s ECGT rules have applied to consumer-facing commercial communications, introducing stricter requirements for environmental claims. That makes it essential to keep track of your sustainability messages, ensure that your claims meet the relevant requirements and have clear, verifiable evidence to support them.

An ECGT Green Claims Scan can help you identify, review and improve your claims across your communication channels.

Should you remove your sustainability claims if you’re unsure about them? Not necessarily. The key is to make sure that what you’re saying is accurate, specific and supported by evidence.

For many organisations, sustainability communication has become a real challenge. Some even resort to ‘greenhushing’: deliberately limiting or avoiding communication about their sustainability efforts for fear of getting it wrong.

Often, the intention behind a sustainability message is positive, but the way it’s communicated isn’t clear or transparent enough.

By communicating openly and backing up your sustainability efforts with solid evidence, you can build trust and reduce the risk of greenwashing. It requires a different way of approaching sustainability communication, as well as practical methods for assessing whether your claims are sufficiently substantiated and meet regulatory requirements.

At The Terrace, we use a five-step approach to help organisations develop honest, clear and well-supported sustainability messages. Find out more in our explainer, ‘A step-by-step guide to clear and honest sustainability claims’.