Legislative proposal on substantiating green claims – EEB position

The EEB welcomes the Commission’s work towards a “Legislative proposal on substantiating green claims”. The EEB actively participates in the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF), its Technical Advisory Board (TAB), as well as the pilot and transition phase projects. The EEB supports the need for standard methodologies to assess the impact on the environment of products on the European market.

While we support the need for reliable, comparable and verifiable information on products, information provision alone will not achieve the Circular Economy Action Plan Objective “to make sustainable goods, services and business models the norm”. First and foremost, this objective will be achieved by denying unsustainable, inefficient, toxic, wasteful, and polluting products, as well as those whose producers fail to carry out due diligence, access to the EU market. For this reason, the most powerful application of PEF will be to support existing and new instruments (e.g. ecodesign, EU Ecolabel, and the construction products regulation) defined in the forthcoming sustainable products initiative in identifying which products are unsustainable.