The Words That Die

There is a sentence in European law that names the words it is killing. Recital 9 of a directive most shoppers have never heard of names them, among others: "environmentally friendly", "eco-friendly", "green", "climate friendly", "biodegradable", "biobased".¹ These are not banned outright — the law is more careful than that — but they are now conditional, and one phrase in the same family is, from a fixed date, simply unsayable on a European shelf when it rests on the wrong kind of accounting.

The phrase is "carbon neutral". For a decade it was a marketing staple, a small badge of climate responsibility on a trainer or a bottle or a flight. From 27 September 2026, on a product sold into the European Union, "carbon neutral" becomes a per-se unlawful claim when it is built on carbon offsetting — credits bought to cancel out emissions the product still made.^1,2 Not "discouraged". Not "must be substantiated". On the blacklist, the way a phantom free gift or a fake countdown timer is on the blacklist: prohibited as a category, no case-by-case argument allowed.

That is a strange fact to sit next to the headline most people actually remember from 2025 — that the EU killed its green law.

The funeral that wasn't the whole story

The headline was real, and it was correctly remembered. In June 2025 the most ambitious piece of the EU's anti-greenwashing programme, the Green Claims Directive, fell apart. On 18 June the European People's Party, the largest group in the European Parliament, wrote to the Environment Commissioner asking for the proposal to be withdrawn, arguing its verification procedures were "overly complex, administratively burdensome, and costly".³ Two days later, on 20 June 2025, the Commission announced it intended to withdraw the proposal. The final trilogue, scheduled for 23 June, was cancelled.³

The precision here is the whole point of this report. The Green Claims Directive was not formally repealed off the register. Because Parliament and Council had already adopted first-reading positions, the Commission cannot simply withdraw it; its status is best described as on hold, abandoned at the altar rather than buried.³ So "the EU killed its green law" is a fair shorthand for a real event — and it is also, as a guide to what is on the shelf in 2026, almost exactly inverted.

Because while that one instrument stalled, two others landed. A different EU directive — the Empowering Consumers Directive, formally Directive (EU) 2024/825, which amends the older Unfair Commercial Practices Directive — writes whole categories of green claim into the EU's per-se blacklist on a dated calendar.¹ Member states must transpose it by 27 March 2026 and apply it from 27 September 2026.² And in the United Kingdom, since 6 April 2025, a regulator can fine a misleading green claim directly, without going to court, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.⁴

The honest summary of 2026, then, is not "the rules collapsed". It is narrower and more useful: fewer words, real teeth, read on a dated calendar. One maximalist law was abandoned. Two binding instruments arrived anyway.

But — and this is the concession that keeps the rest of the report honest — the law that died was not a footnote. It would have done one specific thing that neither survivor does, and that absence is a genuine hole we will come back to. For now, hold both facts at once: the cynic who says "nothing changed" is wrong about what landed, and the cynic who says "they killed the part that mattered" is pointing at something real.

What the new directive actually bans

The Empowering Consumers Directive does not ban green words wholesale. It sorts them. Read the four new entries it adds to the blacklist and you can see the sorting happening in the legal text itself.

The first entry bans displaying "a sustainability label that is not based on a certification scheme or not established by public authorities".¹ The Commission's own background figures explain why: there are around 230 sustainability labels in the EU, and by the Commission's count, half of all green labels offer weak or non-existent verification.⁵ A lemon market of badges, thinned by one line of law.

The second entry is the one that touches the everyday adjective. It bans "making a generic environmental claim for which the trader is not able to demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance".¹ This is where "eco-friendly" and "green" go conditional. The word is not dead — it is reserved. A generic green claim survives if, and only if, it is backed by what the law calls recognised excellent environmental performance.

That phrase resolves, one citation-hop later, into something measurable. The directive's own recital says recognised excellent environmental performance can be shown two ways: by compliance with the EU Ecolabel — Regulation (EC) No 66/2010 — or with officially recognised EN ISO 14024 schemes.¹ And the EU Ecolabel is not a participation trophy. Its criteria are set, in the regulation's words, by "the best environmental performance achieved by products on the market" — the leading products in a category, not the average one.⁶ So after 27 September 2026, a bare "eco-friendly" on an EU shelf is lawful only when the product sits among the genuine top performers, verified against a public scheme. Otherwise the word comes off.

The third entry bans whole-product claims resting on a single good aspect. And the fourth is the offset clause: it bans "claiming, based on the offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions, that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive impact on the environment".¹

That clause repays a slow reading, because it is the hinge of everything that follows. It does not ban the words "carbon neutral" in every context. It bans the claim when it is based on offsetting — when the neutrality rests on credits for action outside the product's own value chain rather than on real reductions inside it. The directive's recital is explicit: neutrality claims should be allowed only when "based on the actual lifecycle impact of the product", not on "the offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions outside the product's value chain".¹ The ban bites the accounting basis, not the adjective. Remember that, because in a moment a near-identical accounting basis is going to walk free.

Why the offset word was worth killing

To see why a regulator bothered, look at what the offset "carbon neutral" claim was resting on.

In January 2023, a nine-month investigation by the Guardian, Die Zeit and the non-profit SourceMaterial reported that more than 90% of the rainforest carbon-offset credits issued by Verra — then the world's largest carbon-credit certifier — were likely "phantom credits" that did not represent genuine carbon reductions.⁷ A peer-reviewed study led by Thales West, published in Science the same year, found that 94% of the forest offsets it scrutinised across 26 projects were non-performing — the conservation benefit they were sold for had largely not materialised.⁸ Verra disputed the methodology of both, arguing the analyses used unsuitable comparison data.⁷

The dispute over the exact percentage does not change the structural point, and the structural point is the one that matters here. An offset "carbon neutral" claim asserts a physical fact about the atmosphere — that this product's emissions were cancelled. But it delivers that fact through a purchased credit: a ledger entry, whose integrity is contested. The claim is an accounting statement wearing the costume of a measurement. That is what the directive's drafters saw, and it is why the offset version of the word goes on the blacklist while a genuine in-value-chain reduction claim does not.

There was money in the word, too, which is the quiet reason these adjectives proliferated. When PwC surveyed more than 20,000 consumers across 31 countries in 2024, they said they were willing to pay, on average, 9.7% more for sustainably produced goods — though PwC itself cautioned that stated willingness "may not translate into actual spend".⁹ A generic green word was a free price-justification lever. The per-se ban removes the lever.

The same trick, the opposite fate

Here is where the legal line and the physical line begin to pull apart, and the cleanest way to feel it is to set two claims side by side on the same imagined shelf.

In one hand, a product that says "carbon neutral" on the strength of offset credits. From 27 September 2026, on an EU shelf, that claim is unlawful — because, as we have seen, it substitutes a ledger credit for a real reduction in the product's own footprint.

In the other hand, a pack that says "30% recycled content", where that figure is certified through a method called mass balance. Mass balance is the accounting system that lets chemically recycled plastic scale before fully segregated recycled feedstock physically exists: recycled material entering a plant is tracked as a credit and allocated across the plant's output on the books. It is an audited, internationally recognised chain-of-custody method, and the volume attributed cannot exceed the volume that physically entered. None of that is in dispute.

What it means for the item in your hand is best stated in the certifier's own words. ISCC, a leading certifier of mass-balance recycled content, explains its method plainly: when a producer receives mass-balanced materials, "it is not guaranteed that the certified recycled materials attributed to his batch are physically there. However, the polyolefin manufacturer attributes the certified feedstock to his outputs in the bookkeeping."¹⁰ A trade-press analysis put the same thing more bluntly: mass balance "turns production inputs into credits that can be allocated to any number of items".¹¹ A pack labelled "30% recycled" under mass balance may contain, in the molecules you are actually holding, no recycled plastic at all. The 30% is true on the books.

Now look at what the two claims have in common. Both substitute a credited quantity on a ledger for a measured physical quantity in the item the shopper is holding. The offset "carbon neutral" claim says carbon was removed; the credit may be phantom. The mass-balance "30% recycled" claim says a third of the material is recycled; the molecules may not be there. Same consumer-facing trick — a number on a balance sheet standing in for a fact about this object — and nothing on either pack tells the shopper that the number is an attribution rather than a measurement.

And yet their legal fates are opposite. The offset word is on the EU blacklist from September 2026. The mass-balance word is not on the blacklist at all; "recycled content" claims sit under the general must-not-mislead regime, not the per-se ban.¹

It would be easy, and wrong, to read that asymmetry as the law being inconsistent. It is not. The directive's drafters drew a defensible line: carbon offsetting credits an action entirely outside the product's value chain — a forest in Brazil has nothing physically to do with the trainer — while mass balance allocates a real input inside one connected, audited production system. That distinction is principled, and it is the reason one claim was banned and the other was not. But the distinction lives in legislative logic. It does no work whatsoever at the shopper's shelf. Standing in the shop, she cannot see whether the ledger credit in her hand was earned inside a value chain or bought outside one. Both words make a physical promise; both deliver an accounting entry; the pack shows her neither. The same trick is illegal in one product and legal in another, and she has no way to tell which she is holding.

The words that live but still don't say much

The offset clause is the dramatic casualty. But most of the green words on the 2026 shelf are not casualties at all. They survive both the EU blacklist and the UK regime, untouched — because the test behind each of them is genuinely passed. The catch is that the test was never measuring the thing the shopper assumes.

Take the survivor word most shoppers trust without thinking: "recyclable", printed beside the familiar chasing-arrows triangle. Walk it through both tests in one breath, and you watch the two lines come apart in your own hand.

The legal test: is "recyclable" banned anywhere? No. It does not appear on the EU blacklist, and the UK regime does not prohibit it. In a laboratory, the material genuinely can be reprocessed. The word passes. It is lawful on a Paris shelf and a Reading shelf alike.

The physical test: what share of it actually gets reprocessed? Here the word goes quiet. An analysis by Beyond Plastics and The Last Beach Cleanup, built on US Environmental Protection Agency data, estimated the 2021 US plastic recycling rate at roughly 5 to 6% — a figure the recycling industry disputes on the grounds that the denominator is too broad, but one that sits in the same low single digits as the EPA's own last published number of 8.7% for 2018.^12,13 Only two resin types — PET (the code 1 triangle) and HDPE (code 2) — are widely reprocessed at all; an FTC discussion of the symbol noted that resin types three, four, six and seven "are not actually getting recycled".¹⁴ The chasing-arrows triangle, it turns out, was never a recyclability guarantee. It is a resin-identification code — a material ID — that happens to look like a promise.

So "recyclable" passes the legal cut-line and fails the physical truth-line, in the same breath, on the same pack. The word is true in a lab and close to empty in the bin. And — this is the part that should change how the word reads — there is no shelf cue, no symbol, no footnote that distinguishes the lawful-and-meaningful from the lawful-and-near-empty. The survivor word looks identical to a true one.

"Compostable" does the same thing in a quieter register. It survives because it passes EN 13432, a real and rigorous standard. But EN 13432 is an industrial-composting test: per the British Plastics Federation's published scope, it requires roughly 90% biodegradation within six months at 58°C, plus disintegration within twelve weeks.¹⁵ A home or council compost bin rarely reaches 58°C. The British Plastics Federation notes there is at present no equivalent national or international EN standard for home compostability, and that home-compostable certification is a separate scheme entirely.¹⁵ So "compostable" names a condition the consumer's bin does not provide. The word is true in a facility most shoppers will never send the packaging to.

This is the second population of words. Not the ones that die, and not the ones that now carry verified weight — but the ones that live on, legally untouched, naming a passed test that measured something other than the outcome the shopper cares about.

The UK shelf and the missing floor

A Reading shopper meets this sorting through a regime that is shaped differently from the EU's. Britain has no equivalent of the Empowering Consumers Directive; after Brexit it does not bind GB.¹⁶ Instead the UK runs a principle-based regime: the CMA's Green Claims Code from 2021, now backed by the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.^4,16 There is no dated word-ban here — no September 2026 line after which "carbon neutral" comes off the shelf. There is, instead, a regulator that can now act directly.

What changed in the UK is power, not vocabulary. From 6 April 2025, the CMA can decide that a business has broken consumer law — including by making a misleading green claim — without taking the case to court first, and can impose a penalty capped at the higher of £300,000 or 10% of the business's worldwide turnover.⁴ In January 2026 it published guidance extending responsibility down the supply chain, ruling that a business "makes" a claim even by stocking a product and passing on a partner's green statement.¹⁷ A retailer can no longer hide behind a supplier's assurance.

Be exact about what this power is and is not, because the temptation is to call it teeth that have already bitten. They have not yet. The clearest UK green-claims episode on the public record predates the fining power entirely. In March 2024 the CMA secured formal undertakings from three fashion sellers — ASOS, Boohoo, and George at Asda — to change how they displayed green credentials, after an investigation into search filters, "natural" imagery and vague "eco" ranges. The CMA's own wording is careful: those undertakings were "provided to the CMA voluntarily and without any admission of wrongdoing or liability", and "it should not be assumed that ASOS, Boohoo, or George at Asda have breached the law — at present, only a court can decide whether a breach has occurred".¹⁸ No fine. No finding of infringement. And it happened more than a year before the direct fining power went live on 6 April 2025, which applies only to conduct from that date forward.^4,18

So the right way to read that episode is as the before picture — what enforcement looked like when the regulator had no direct fine to levy. The power that now exists is a real and significant change. But as of mid-2026, it is a new and untested instrument, not a record of fines imposed. "Real teeth" means the teeth are there; it does not yet mean they have closed.

And this is where the law that died comes back. The abandoned Green Claims Directive would have installed one thing neither survivor regime does: an ex-ante measurement floor. Before a company could print a specific green claim — "uses 30% less water", say — an independent third party would have had to verify it was true, in advance.³ The Empowering Consumers Directive bans categories of the worst claims and polices the rest after the claim is on the shelf and the sale is made. It installs no pre-print verification gate.^1,3 The very requirement that was abandoned, on the grounds that it was too burdensome, is the requirement that would have put a measured fact behind a specific green claim before a shopper ever read it. So the cynic who says "they killed the part that mattered" has a real point: the measurement floor died, and nothing replaced it. The honest finding is that the rules did not collapse — not that the rules are now complete.

What would change this reading

The reasonable version of the opposing case deserves to be stated in full, because most of it is true. The 2026 regime is proportionate, not a failure. It banned the genuinely worst per-se claims — offset neutrality, uncertified labels, bald unsubstantiated generics — on a clear dated calendar, and it abandoned the maximalist verification regime because checking every specific claim in advance was, candidly, expensive and would have fallen hardest on small firms. The offset/mass-balance distinction it drew is principled, not arbitrary. The survivor words name real, tested technical properties; the gap between the EN 13432 test and a home bin is partly an infrastructure problem — no kerbside reprocessing, no industrial composter on the street — and not purely a labelling one. And the UK's regulator now holds a genuine fining power it will presumably use as cases arise. Every clause of that is true, and this report concedes all of it.

The one thing it does not account for is the thing this whole piece is about: none of it is legible to the shopper at the shelf. The same ledger trick is illegal in one product and legal in another, on different dates, in two jurisdictions, and no label tells her which she is holding. The survivor word looks identical to a measured one. And the single instrument that would have forced a measured fact behind a specific claim is the one that was abandoned.

Two developments would materially change this reading, and both are worth watching. The first: if Britain adopts a dated word-ban equivalent to the EU's offset prohibition, or the CMA's principle-based regime hardens into per-se rules, the EU/GB divergence narrows. As of June 2026 it has not. The second: if the Green Claims Directive is revived with its ex-ante verification intact — it is on hold, not dead — the measurement-floor seam closes. As of June 2026, it has not been. A third would settle the survivor-word question entirely: if a standard began testing the physical outcome the word implies — real reprocessing rate rather than theoretical recyclability, home-bin compostability rather than industrial, recycled molecules rather than mass-balance bookkeeping — the gap behind those words would close. No such standard yet exists on the shelf.

What to do on Saturday

So you are standing in the shop in late 2026, a product in each hand, and the labels will not tell you their own biographies. What is actually worth doing?

Read every green word in two steps, and you can do most of the work yourself, unaided by the pack.

Step one is the calendar. For each green word, ask which dated rule touches it, in which market. On a product sold into the EU after 27 September 2026, treat an offset-based "carbon neutral" claim as a red flag that the listing may not be compliant — the offset version of that claim is per-se unlawful there. Treat a bare "eco-friendly" or "green" on an EU product as meaningful only if it names a recognised scheme behind it — the EU Ecolabel, or an EN ISO 14024 label — because without one, the word should not legally be there. On a UK product, the same words are not banned, but they are fineable if they mislead, so read them as a claim the regulator could act on, not as a certified truth.

Step two is the one that catches the survivors. For any word that is not banned — "recyclable", "compostable", "30% recycled" — ask what physical quantity it names, and whether that quantity was measured or merely credited. A claim that names a specific, checkable quantity — "100% recycled HDPE", or "uses 30% less water, verified by [named scheme]" — is naming something. An adjective on its own — "eco-friendly", "sustainable" — and a bare mass-balance "30% recycled" with no specific scheme named, are not. The form of the claim tells you which.

Three concrete moves carry it. First, read the specific measured claim, not the adjective — this is a reading habit, not a product, and it is the single most useful thing you can take to any shelf. Second, if you compost at home, look for a home-compost certification such as OK Compost HOME, not the industrial-only EN 13432 the word "compostable" usually rests on; the difference decides whether the packaging breaks down in your bin or sits there intact. Third, treat "carbon neutral" on an EU-market product after the September 2026 date as a signal to check, not a guarantee — on a UK product, as fineable-if-unsubstantiated, not certified-true.

The rules did not die. They got teeth and a calendar. From 27 September 2026, offset "carbon neutral" is unlawful on EU shelves; a bare "eco-friendly" there is lawful only when the product genuinely leads its category; and in Britain the CMA can now fine a misleading green claim directly. That is real, and it is worth knowing. But a banned word is not a measured fact, and a survivor word is not a true one. The same accounting trick that just became illegal as an offset claim is still perfectly legal as a recycled-content one — and on the Saturday you go shopping, nothing on either pack will tell you which lane you are in. Reading the calendar, and reading the word's form, is how you find out for yourself.