27 September reaches your website. Your investor update answers to different law.

Somewhere in your last investor update, or the case study you published in the spring, there is a sentence about impact, or emissions avoided, or performance against a benchmark that runs slightly ahead of the evidence behind it. Every word of it is defensible except the size of the claim. It is the kind of sentence a good writer produces when the job is to make something sound compelling and nobody in the room is paid to push back.

On 27 September the rules on that sentence change in the EU. Which sentence, and on which page, turns out to be the whole question.

The Direction

Two instruments, and the sector has been briefed almost entirely on the one that stalled.

The EU Green Claims Directive, proposed on 22 March 2023, has not been adopted and has no indicated date. The Commission announced on 20 June 2025 that it intended to withdraw the proposal, and the trilogue set for 23 June was cancelled, both recorded by Parliament's Legislative Train rather than by the Legislative Observatory. It has not formally withdrawn it. The Legislative Observatory still records the file as awaiting the Council's first reading position, and the Commission's 2026 work programme, adopted at Strasbourg on 21 October 2025, lists it among its pending proposals. Treat it as stalled rather than gone, and read the register yourself before you rely on either account of it.

The instrument with a date on it was adopted eighteen months ago. Directive (EU) 2024/825, on empowering consumers for the green transition, entered into force on 26 March 2024. Article 4 gave member states until 27 March 2026 to adopt and publish national implementing measures, and requires them to apply those measures "from 27 September 2026". What you will be read against is each member state's transposing law rather than the directive itself.

Two provisions reach the kind of writing this bulletin is about.

Annex I to the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive lists the practices treated as unfair in all circumstances, with no case by case assessment. Directive (EU) 2024/825 inserts a new point 4a: "Making a generic environmental claim for which the trader is not able to demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to the claim." Recital 9 gives the examples, and the list runs longer than most briefings carry: "environmentally friendly", "eco-friendly", "green", "nature's friend", "ecological", "environmentally correct", "climate friendly", "gentle on the environment", "carbon friendly", "energy efficient", "biodegradable", "biobased".

A claim of that kind is caught only where you leave it unspecified, which is the part the briefings tend to drop. Recital 9 works the example itself: "climate-friendly packaging" is generic, while "100 % of energy used to produce this packaging comes from renewable sources" is specific and falls outside that prohibition, without prejudice to the other provisions of the directive, which continue to apply. Where the claim stays generic, the way through is recognised excellent environmental performance, which recital 10 ties to the EU Ecolabel under Regulation (EC) No 66/2010, officially recognised EN ISO 14024 ecolabelling schemes, or top environmental performance for a specific environmental characteristic under other Union law. Almost nobody building hardware in this sector clears that gate, which makes specifying the claim the achievable route and the label the theoretical one.

The second provision is a new point (d) inserted into Article 6(2). From 27 September it makes an environmental claim about future performance misleading where it is made "without clear, objective, publicly available and verifiable commitments set out in a detailed and realistic implementation plan that includes measurable and time-bound targets and other relevant elements necessary to support its implementation, such as allocation of resources, and that is regularly verified by an independent third party expert, whose findings are made available to consumers". This limb turns on a case by case assessment. Recital 4 says so of the future performance prohibition in terms, and Article 6(2) bites only where the practice, in its factual context, causes or is likely to cause the average consumer to take a transactional decision they would not have taken otherwise.

So "net zero by 2035" now needs a plan and a verifier behind it. On some of your pages.

The two provisions do not work the same way

This is the difference worth carrying out of the issue.

Annex I lists practices unfair in all circumstances. The generic claims prohibition therefore applies with no transactional decision test at all. A generic claim you cannot substantiate is caught on its face, whether or not it moved anybody.

The future performance limb has that test. A claim without a plan behind it is caught only where it was likely to change what somebody did.

The blacklist is the sharper of the two, and it is the one aimed squarely at the adjectives.

Which document answers to which regime

Directive (EU) 2024/825 amends Directive 2005/29/EC, and Article 3(1) of that directive applies it to "unfair business-to-consumer commercial practices". A consumer, at Article 2(a), is "any natural person who ... is acting for purposes which are outside his trade, business, craft or profession". Recital 6 hands transactions between traders back to national law. The UK regime draws the same line: section 225(3) of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 runs to the promotion or supply of a product "to a consumer", and the CMA's own guidance illustrates the exclusion with a trader who sells specialist tractor parts to businesses only.

Your investor update sits outside both. So does a case study written for enterprise buyers. What 27 September reaches is the consumer-facing surface: the website, the product page, the packaging, the advertising a member of the public sees.

Those other documents have their own regulators, and on the whole they ask harder questions. In the United States, SEC Rule 10b-5 makes it unlawful "to make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading ... in connection with the purchase or sale of any security", and it binds private companies and unregistered offerings rather than listed issuers alone. In the UK, section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 restricts communicating "an invitation or inducement ... to engage in investment activity". Business to business marketing answers to the Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations 2008 here, and to Directive 2006/114/EC in the EU.

It also answers to the FTC's Green Guides, and this is the part worth stopping on. 16 CFR Part 260 still carries the source note "77 FR 62124, Oct. 11, 2012, unless otherwise noted", and the eCFR records no amendment since. The FTC announced a regulatory review on 14 December 2022, published it on 20 December at 87 FR 77766, extended the comment period into April 2023, and held a workshop that May. That review is still open. Nothing has been amended and no revised text has been proposed, so the guidance you are read against today is the text of October 2012, standing unchanged for nearly fourteen years while its own review runs. And 16 CFR 260.1 says in terms: "These guides also apply to business-to-business transactions."

Two qualifications, because the point is better with them than without.

The Green Guides are guidance rather than law. The same section says they "do not confer any rights on any person and do not operate to bind the FTC or the public", and the binding instrument behind them is section 5 of the FTC Act. And business to business claims are not unregulated on this side of the Atlantic either. The CMA's guidance, in the same passage that takes B2B traders outside the consumer regime, points them at the 2008 Regulations instead.

What survives both qualifications is the thing that matters to you. The American guidance names business to business transactions expressly. The European provisions arriving on 27 September do not reach them at all.

The Sentence

For 25 years, every argument I built at the Bar had to survive two readings. Where the other side had counsel, that was somebody paid to find the weak joint in it. Where they did not, and in family work that is now close to half the private law list, the judge did the same job unaided, with a full day of other cases behind it. Either way the task was to take a complicated factual position and make it followable, persuasive and difficult to attack. Those three have to travel together. Followable but unpersuasive moves nobody, and persuasive but attackable is a liability.

Reading your own draft that way is a habit rather than a qualification, and it moves a claim in a consistent direction. The example below is one I have built to show the movement, drawn from the pattern rather than from any one company's page.

As drafted

Three things are absent and a regulator will find all three. Conventional production is an unnamed comparator. Emissions has no boundary, so the figure could describe one process step or an entire product life. And nobody has said who checked.

Half corrected

The comparator is named. The boundary and the verification are still missing, which leaves the number doing more work than the evidence supports.

Grounded

Two lines longer, and the claim survived intact. The 90% is still there, in the same position, at the same size. The sentence now carries the answer to every question that would otherwise be put to it later, by somebody less friendly.

Two tests, ten seconds each.

Against what, measured how, over what boundary? If your strongest claim cannot answer all three from the page, it is ahead of its evidence.

What document do you hand over? Ask it of every number you publish. Where there is no document, either commission one or write a smaller sentence.

The Ruling

Worth reading for anyone who believes accuracy is enough on its own.

On 20 December 2023 the ASA ruled against Equinor ASA over a national press advertisement seen in June 2023, which had appeared in The Economist. The advertisement stated "Wind, oil, gas, carbon capture" and "IT'S ALL PART OF THE BROADER ENERGY PICTURE", with a footnote at the foot of the page. The ASA raised the challenge itself and upheld it.

Every element was true. Equinor does all four. The ASA held that the claim "gave equal prominence to each of those activities", and that the advertisement, read with the text at the foot of the page, "gave the overall impression that CCS and energy sourced from windfarms formed a significant proportion of Equinor's business activities, alongside oil and gas". Against that impression it set what it took from Equinor's own 2022 Integrated Annual Report: capital expenditure on renewable investments at 14% in 2022, growing to 30% by 2025, oil and gas production of around 2,039 thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day, and its understanding that "large-scale global oil and gas investment and extraction formed the vast majority of Equinor's business activities and would continue to do so in the near future". Even on the company's own forward figure, the balance was not what the advertisement conveyed. The ASA concluded that "further information about the overall proportion of Equinor's business model that comprised renewable energy and CCS was material information that should have been included".

A composition of true sentences was found misleading.

That is the finding that travels. Your claims are assessed as a whole, in the impression they leave, by a reader you do not get to brief.

One enforcement note while you are here, because it changes the arithmetic on getting this wrong in the UK. The CMA's Green Claims Code, published on 20 September 2021, is guidance. From 6 April 2025, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 and its second commencement order, the CMA can decide for itself whether consumer protection law has been infringed without having to take a company to court. Section 182(6) lets it impose a penalty of up to £300,000, or 10% of turnover if that is higher, and turnover there includes turnover outside the United Kingdom. At your stage the £300,000 limb is the one that bites, and the percentage figure quoted in most write-ups is the wrong one to plan against.

Next issue: I read twenty-seven funded climate company homepages against a rule fixed before I opened any of them, looking for the first sentence a direct competitor could not publish unchanged and truthfully. Three put it in the headline. Eighteen had already written it, further down the page. Six never got to it at all. Two of these three numbers changed on a re-read. The corrected figures, and why, are in issue two.

Every provision above is quoted from the Official Journal text, the eCFR, the statute or the ruling itself. Reply to the email version if you want the references and I will send the list.

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