Europe is rewriting what counts as a green claim. And much more besides.

What changed

A new directive, a hard date.

Directive 2024/825, the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, was adopted by the European Parliament and Council in February 2024. Member States must transpose it into national law by 27 March 2026 and apply it from 27 September 2026.

It does not create a new agency. It rewires two existing ones, the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive, to ban a list of practices that almost every brand currently uses without thinking about it.

Why one rule touches everything

Fourteen regulations. One audit.

ECGT does not live alone. A green claim that fails the new test usually fails the older Unfair Commercial Practices Directive too. A product page that promises a feature you do not deliver hits the Consumer Rights Directive. A contact form without an Article 13 legal basis hits GDPR. An analytics tag firing before consent hits ePrivacy. A chatbot trained on customer data hits the AI Act.

We score every page against fourteen regulation families in one pass: ECGT, UCPD, Consumer Rights Directive, Unfair Contract Terms, e-Commerce Directive, GDPR, ePrivacy, the Digital Services Act, the AI Act, the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, the Right to Repair Directive, the General Product Safety Regulation, and the European Accessibility Act. Each finding is tied to a specific article. Each suggested rewrite is grounded in the actual text.

Generic green words, future pledges, self awarded labels, hidden subscriptions, dark patterns at checkout, missing legal bases, pre consent trackers, undisclosed AI. All of it surfaces in the same dossier.

The next wave

Packaging, durability, repair.

ECGT is the front of a longer queue. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation with its Digital Product Passport, and the Right to Repair Directive are already in the official journal. They reach the parts of your site that ECGT does not: pack copy, product specs, repairability scores, spare parts pages, return windows.

Deep Scan goes further on these three with dedicated checks: packaging composition, durability scoring, and repair information. Same dossier format. Same article level citations. Same fixes, written for you.

Who enforces it

National consumer authorities. Same teeth as GDPR.

Each Member State enforces through the body that already polices misleading advertising. In France that is the DGCCRF. In Germany the Verbraucherzentralen and competitors. In Italy the AGCM. They have inspection powers and can act on complaints from consumer associations and competitors.

Under the Modernisation Directive that frames this regime, maximum fines for cross border infringements must be at least 4 percent of the trader's annual turnover in the Member States concerned, or at least 2 million euros where that figure is not available.

Why it matters now

Twelve months. Then live.

By the time the directive applies in September 2026, every product page, every homepage hero, every social ad and every packaging line that mentions the environment needs to either survive a regulator reading it or be rewritten.

Brands with five hundred SKUs cannot do this in the last quarter. The audit takes weeks. The legal review takes weeks. The rewrite and republish across channels takes longer than the audit and the legal review combined.