Europe is shows greenwashing the red card. With the planned Green Claims Directive, the EU Commission wants to create more transparency in environmental advertising claims and prevent consumers from being misled.
In a study, ‘The State of Green Claims 2024’, the experts from House of Change have examined the extent to which manufacturers are already meeting the expected new requirements. The result: of 163 advertising claims on 78 branded items, only three meet the criteria Green Claims Directive.
The good news: The ‘Made for Recycling’ seal is one of the few positive exceptions. According to the study, the company Hochland Deutschland GmbH uses this to advertise the recyclability of its Grünländer cheese packaging in a transparent, understandable and well-founded manner. In addition to the information ‘Recyclability: very good,’ Grünländer has, among other things, printed a link through which consumers can directly view the Interseroh+ certificate.
“The path to responsible consumption leads through transparent, reliable information,” says Frank Kurrat, CSO of Interseroh+. “With ‘Made for Recycling’, we support our customers in becoming legally compliant when it comes to packaging – and sustainably standing out from the competition.”
Verifiability is crucial
One of the core criteria of the new EU directive, which will come into force at the end of 2024 at the earliest, is the verifiability of green claims. According to the draft, anyone who prints statements such as ‘climate-neutral’ or ‘recyclable’ on their packaging must be able to prove this in the future. ‘Made for Recycling’, the internationally recognized standard for the recyclability of packaging, is based on a scientific evaluation methodology that was developed by Interseroh+ together with the bifa Environmental Institute and confirmed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging IVV.
The packaging is analyzed at Interzero’s Plastics Recycling Competence Center in Maribor, the only officially accredited research facility in the EU specializing in the development and analysis of recycled plastics. Not only the materials and design of the packaging are examined, but also the practical sorting and recycling infrastructure, which can vary greatly from country to country. This provides manufacturers with valuable information for the sustainable optimization of their packaging.
After a successful packaging analysis, the ‘Made for Recycling’ seal can be used if the rating is good or very good.
Interseroh+ is a recycling alliance of the circular service provider Interzero. The offer from Interseroh+ is aimed at all companies that not only want to fulfill their legal obligation to license packaging, but take responsibility for closing recycling and raw material cycles – they can become a member of the Recycling Alliance.
Interzero is one of the leading service providers for closing product, material and logistics cycles as well as an innovation leader in plastics recycling with the largest sorting capacity in Europe.
