Your Website Calls It Eco-Friendly. New Green Claims Rules Start 27 September.

Three phrases on the homepage of a furniture workshop in Galway stop being lawful on 27 September. Nobody there lied, and nobody cut a corner. The owner wrote the copy himself in an afternoon four years ago, in the plainest words he could think of, and it has sat there since.

That workshop is a composite, drawn from the pattern we see week after week on sites we host: an owner who genuinely does the decent thing, describes it in ordinary language, and now finds that the ordinary language is exactly what Irish consumer law has singled out.

The three phrases are these. "Eco-friendly finish." "A sustainable business from start to finish." "Carbon-neutral delivery on all Irish orders."

Each one fails for a different reason, and each has a different fix. One of them cannot be fixed with words at all.

The law that arrived while everyone was reading about the other one

In June 2025, a lot of business owners read that the EU had dropped its big anti-greenwashing law. That was broadly true, and it was also about a completely different piece of legislation.

The one that got pulled was the proposed Green Claims Directive, a separate instrument that would have required advance verification of environmental claims. Its withdrawal was signalled on 20 June 2025, and trilogue negotiations were halted days later. Irish and international law firms tracking it, including Mason Hayes and Curran, note that the proposal has still not been formally withdrawn and its future remains unresolved. Take that reporting as the state of play among practitioners rather than a settled legal position.

Meanwhile, the law that actually binds you was already signed. Directive (EU) 2024/825, the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive, was transposed into Irish law by the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment on 27 March 2026 as S.I. No. 124 of 2026. Regulation 1(2) sets the commencement date: 27 September 2026 ^[1].

It amends two statutes you may already have met. The Consumer Protection Act 2007, which is where prohibited commercial practices live, and the Consumer Rights Act 2022, which governs what you must tell a customer before they buy. Both are enforced by the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.

So the sequence matters. The dramatic law was shelved. Its quiet counterpart commenced on schedule. Most owners only heard about the first.

Phrase one: "eco-friendly finish"

This is what the Regulations call a generic environmental claim, and from 27 September it goes on the automatic prohibition list. The new paragraph inserted at section 55(1)(ia) of the 2007 Act bans "making a generic environmental claim, where the trader is not able to demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance relevant to that claim" ^[1].

Recognised excellent environmental performance is a narrow door. In practice it means the EU Ecolabel, a national or regional EN ISO 14024 Type I ecolabelling scheme such as the Nordic Swan or Blue Angel, or top-tier performance established under other EU law. A supplier's marketing pack is not a scheme. Neither is a logo you designed yourself.

Almost no small Irish business will hold one of those. That sounds like a dead end. It is not, because of how the term is defined.

The CCPC's own glossary defines a generic environmental claim as one "that is not included on a sustainability label and where the specification of the claim is not provided in clear and prominent terms on the same medium" ^[2].

Read the last seven words again. On the same medium. The problem is not the word. It is the word standing on its own.

"Eco-friendly finish" is prohibited. "Finished with a plant-oil sealant, so there are no solvent-based VOCs released in your kitchen" is a specific, checkable claim sitting in the same place as the word it explains. That version survives, provided it is true and you can produce the evidence.

For the workshop, that is a copywriting job of about two hours across nine product pages. To the customer standing in their kitchen wondering what "eco-friendly" was supposed to mean, it is the first time the phrase has told them anything at all.

One warning on this. The European Commission's guidance is explicit that words like "sustainable", "conscious" and "responsible" cannot be rescued by an ecolabel even where you hold one, because they reach beyond environmental characteristics into social ones. Those words need specification or removal. There is no certificate that buys them back.

Phrase two: "a sustainable business from start to finish"

The second new prohibition, at section 55(1)(ib), covers "making an environmental claim relating to an entire product or the trader's entire business, where the claim concerns only a certain aspect of that product or a specific activity of the trader's business" ^[1].

The workshop sources its ash from certified Irish forestry. Genuinely, verifiably, with paperwork. It also runs two diesel vans, heats a draughty shed with oil, and ships in brass fittings from the far side of the world.

One good thing became a claim about everything. That is the practice the paragraph describes.

The fix is smaller than it looks: move the claim down to the thing it is actually about. "Our ash is sourced from certified Irish forestry" is accurate, evidenced, and arguably sells harder than the vague version, because a customer can picture it.

Phrase three: "carbon-neutral delivery"

This one cannot be rewritten, because the prohibition is aimed at the mechanism rather than the wording.

Section 55(1)(ic) bans "making a claim, based on the offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions, that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive impact on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions" ^[1].

If the neutrality comes from buying offsets, the claim goes. Not softened, not caveated, not moved to a footnote. Removed. You can still say you buy offsets, and you can say what you bought and why, but you cannot convert that purchase into a claim that the delivery had no climate impact.

For an owner who has been paying for offsets in good faith for three years, this feels harsh. From the enforcement side it is the single most predictable claim to test, because there is no evidence you can produce that makes an offset into a reduction at the point of delivery.

What this actually looks like when it goes wrong

Nobody sends you a warning letter on 26 September.

What happens is slower and more awkward. A customer, or more often a competitor who has done their own audit and is annoyed about it, reports the page. Contravening section 55(1) is an offence under section 56 of the 2007 Act, and the penalties in section 79 run to a fine of up to €3,000 or six months on a first summary conviction, up to €5,000 or twelve months on a subsequent one, and up to €60,000 or eighteen months on conviction on indictment ^[3]. Before any of that, the CCPC can issue compliance notices and fixed payment notices.

Then there is the part no fine measures. The page that gets screenshotted is your page, in your words, with your product photo beside it. Your reputation for honesty was the whole asset, and the copy that damaged it was four years old and nobody had read it since.

This is not scaremongering about a hypothetical. A Commission study in 2020 examined 150 environmental claims across the EU and found just over half were vague, misleading or unfounded, with around four in ten unsubstantiated ^[4]. Small sample, single snapshot, so treat it as an indication of scale rather than a precise measure. The direction of travel is not really in doubt, though, and it is why the Regulations exist.

The requirement that catches every shop, green claims or not

One requirement in these Regulations gets almost no coverage, and it has nothing to do with the environment.

From 27 September, if you sell goods, you must display an official EU harmonised notice on your website in a prominent manner. Not a paraphrase of it. The exact artwork, set out in Annex I to Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960, inserted into Irish law as section 125A of the Consumer Rights Act 2022 ^[1].

The notice tells customers about the minimum two-year legal guarantee of conformity, and it carries a QR code in the top right corner that resolves to the consumer rights applying in their country. Placement is set out in the CCPC's guidance for business: the product catalogue page, the header of your website, or the checkout page. Online it must be in colour ^[2].

There is a second piece of artwork, the harmonised label, from Annex II. That one applies where a producer offers a free commercial guarantee of durability covering the whole product for more than two years and makes the information available to you. It goes next to the product image or on the checkout page, and a nested format is permitted.

So what does that mean on a Tuesday morning? It means every Irish site selling goods has a mandatory image to place, in a specific format, in one of three specific locations, before the end of September. If you cannot edit your own site, that is a change request in somebody else's queue. Owners who can edit will spend a few minutes on one block and a deploy.

Worth verifying now rather than in the last week: whether whoever holds your admin login is still contactable, and whether your production site can actually take a new element in the header without breaking the layout on mobile. Test it in a staging environment first. That is what staging is for.

Durability, repairability, and the guarantee line you should delete

The workshop's other headline is "built to last a lifetime". Section 55(1)(zf) prohibits "falsely claiming that, under normal conditions of use, a good has a certain durability in terms of usage time or intensity" ^[1]. Lifetime is a durability claim. If the ash table genuinely lasts decades, the fix is to say decades and stand behind it. Where the number came from enthusiasm rather than testing, it goes.

Alongside that, Schedule 2 and Schedule 3 of the 2022 Act gain new pre-contractual information duties. Where a reparability score exists for the goods, you show it. Absent a score, and provided the producer makes the information available to you, you must give the availability and estimated cost of spare parts and how to order them, whether repair and maintenance instructions exist, and any restrictions on repair ^[1].

For a furniture maker this is close to free, because the answers are all yes. A shop reselling somebody else's electronics has an email to send to the distributor, and probably a chase after it.

And one line to go looking for specifically, because it is on an enormous number of Irish sites: any version of "two-year guarantee included" presented as a selling point. Section 55(1)(pa) prohibits presenting legal requirements that apply to all products in the category as a distinctive feature of your offer. The two-year legal guarantee is the law. Advertising it as your idea is now a prohibited practice.

I will admit to getting this wrong on a first pass myself. Reviewing our own pages against the draft guidance earlier this year, I cleared three claims because I recognised the certification mark beside them. I could not have told you who audited that scheme or what it covered. Recognising a logo is not evidence. I went back and did it again properly.

Your 27 September audit, in five passes

Inventory. Search your own site for green, eco, sustainable, natural, carbon, recyclable, plastic-free, responsible and conscious. Include product descriptions, the About page, the footer, image captions and alt text, and any PDF you link to.

Specify or cut. For each hit, either put the specific, checkable fact in the same place as the word, or delete the word. There is no third option that survives.

Verify the evidence. For every claim you keep, name the document that proves it and confirm you could produce it in under a minute. If you cannot, the claim is not evidenced, however true you believe it to be.

Deploy the notice. Add the harmonised notice artwork to your catalogue page, header or checkout, in colour, and add the durability label where a producer has given you one. Test in staging, then push to production.

Re-read the guarantee copy. Remove any framing that sells the legal two-year guarantee, or any other legal requirement, as something distinctive about you.

Five passes, and for most small sites the whole job is an afternoon of careful reading and a short deploy. It is only a crisis if you find out in the last week of September that you cannot edit your own website.

What the ability to make this change is actually worth

That last point is the one I would sit with.

Every business affected by these Regulations needs to change words on pages, in the same five-week window, in a country with a finite number of people who do that work for hire. If your site is built on a platform where copy changes go through somebody else, this is a queue and an invoice. Change requests at €75 to €150 an hour are not unusual, and September is going to be busy.

If you hold the login to your own WordPress site, none of that applies. You open the page, you fix the sentence, you publish. That is the practical argument for owning the thing rather than renting access to it, and it is why Web60's €60 a year, everything included, full WordPress access from day one is built the way it is. Regulatory deadlines are not rare events. This is the third one to touch Irish product pages in eighteen months, after the rules governing the reviews on your own testimonials page and the product safety duties that landed on product pages.

An honest limitation, because there is one. Owning your site makes the change fast. It does not make the claim true. No content management system on earth can substantiate "eco-friendly" for you, and if the evidence does not exist, the only compliant edit is deletion. Speed helps with the second half of this job. The first half is still a filing cabinet and an honest afternoon.

A second limitation, equally honest. The harmonised notice artwork is fixed by EU implementing regulation. You cannot restyle it to match your brand, you cannot recolour it, and online it must appear in colour. Some owners will hate how it looks on a carefully designed product page. That is the deal, and there is no version of compliance that avoids it.

Where a hosted platform genuinely wins

If you run a single-product shop on a large hosted storefront, that platform will almost certainly roll the harmonised notice out as a template setting across every store on it, and you will get it for free without touching anything. For a one-person operation with three SKUs and no interest in ever editing a template, that centralised rollout is a real advantage over doing it yourself, and I would not pretend otherwise.

The trade is the one it always is. What the platform gives you centrally, it also controls centrally, including where the notice sits and what your product pages are allowed to look like around it. For a business with nine product pages and specific things to say about each of them, that control is worth more than the free rollout.

Conclusion

The workshop in Galway does the right thing. It always did. Certified timber, a finish you could eat off, tables that outlive the people who buy them. What it lacked was not integrity. It was the habit of writing down which part of the story it could prove.

That is the actual shift arriving on 27 September. Not a ban on caring about the environment, and not a trap for honest traders. A requirement that the sentence on the page and the evidence in the drawer match each other, word for word.

Go and read your own homepage the way a stranger would. The words that made you pause are the ones to start with.

Frequently Asked Questions

When do the new Irish green claims rules start?

27 September 2026. The European Union (Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition) Regulations 2026, S.I. No. 124 of 2026, were signed on 27 March 2026 and Regulation 1(2) sets commencement at 27 September 2026. The rules apply to traders selling to consumers, in store and online.

Can I still use the word "eco-friendly" on my website?

Only if you either hold recognised excellent environmental performance, such as the EU Ecolabel, or you provide the specification of the claim in clear and prominent terms in the same place. "Eco-friendly" standing on its own is a generic environmental claim and becomes a prohibited practice. Adding the fact rescues it: "eco-friendly packaging, made from 100% recycled cardboard" is a specified claim, provided the specific part is true and evidenced.

Do these rules apply to service businesses, or only shops selling products?

The environmental claims rules apply to claims about products and services both, so a cleaning company advertising green products or a hotel advertising a sustainable stay is in scope. Duties around the harmonised notice and the durability and reparability information relate to goods, so a pure service business does not display those.

What is the harmonised notice and where does it go on my site?

It is a standard EU artwork informing customers of the minimum two-year legal guarantee of conformity, with a QR code linking to the consumer rights in their country. The CCPC's guidance for business names the product catalogue page, your website header, or the checkout page as acceptable prominent placements. Online it must be displayed in colour, in the exact design set out in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960.

Was the EU green claims law not scrapped last year?

A different one was. The Commission announced its intention to withdraw the proposed Green Claims Directive in June 2025, and its status remains unresolved according to law firms tracking it. Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition is a separate instrument, adopted in 2024, and Ireland transposed it in March 2026. It commences as planned.

What happens if I miss the deadline?

The CCPC can issue compliance notices and fixed payment notices. Contravening the prohibited practices list in section 55(1) of the Consumer Protection Act 2007 is an offence under section 56, with penalties under section 79 running from a fine of up to €3,000 or six months on a first summary conviction to €60,000 or eighteen months on conviction on indictment. If you are unsure whether a specific claim on your site is caught, read the CCPC guidance and take advice from your solicitor rather than guessing.

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