Environmental claims on goods and services

What environmental claims don’t say can also influence the decisions consumers make. Claims made by your business must not omit or hide information that consumers need to make informed choices.

These sorts of omissions can occur where claims focus on saying one thing but not another, or where they say nothing at all. It is vital that your business pays close attention to the information on environmental impacts that consumers need to make decisions and reflect that in the claims you make.

Consumers can be misled where claims do not say anything about environmental impacts. This can also happen where claims focus on just one aspect of a product, service, brand or business. They can be misleading because of what they do not include or what they hide.

Your claims should not just focus on the positive environmental aspects of a product, service, process, brand or business, where other aspects have a negative impact and consumers could be misled. This is especially so if the benefits claimed only relate to a relatively minor aspect of a product or service or part of your brand’s or a business’s products and activities. Cherry-picking information like this is likely to make consumers think your product, service, process, brand or business as a whole is greener than it really is.

Checklist to not omit or hide important information on environmental claims

Before making claims, you should ask yourself:

• What environmental impacts does my product, service, process, brand, or business have (positive and negative, taking account of its whole life cycle)? 
• What do consumers need to know about environmental impacts to make informed choices about my product, service, brand or business?
• Should I include information about the durability or disposability of a product in any environmental claim?
• Do I need to caveat any claims that I am making, or explain them in more detail?
• Where I do not plan to include information in a claim, why not?
• Is there anything I need to tell consumers so they can make informed choices, but that I genuinely cannot fit into my claim?

You can find examples and more detail on these questions by downloading Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) guidance on environmental claims on goods and services (PDF, 505K).