From 27 September, EU law bans unproven green claims and uncertified sustainability labels on every physical product: the text sets no exception for stock already printed and shelved, and 20 of 27 member states have not finished writing it into their own law

A hard EU-wide date, a text silent on stock already made

Directive (EU) 2024/825, known informally as the EmpCo or Green Transition Directive, amends two existing consumer-protection texts: the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) and the Consumer Rights Directive (2011/83/EU). On the practices side, it adds roughly a dozen new items to Annex I's blacklist: false durability claims, presenting a non-repairable good as repairable, inducing consumers to replace a component or consumable earlier than genuinely necessary, withholding information about a feature (a software update, for instance) that will limit a product's durability, and presenting a requirement the law already imposes on every product in the category as a distinctive feature of the trader's own offer. On the labeling side, it adds new pre-contractual duties about the EU's standard two-year legal guarantee, and requires a harmonised 'EU GARAN' label whenever a producer offers a commercial durability guarantee exceeding two years, covering the whole product, at no extra cost. The Commission fixed the binding design of both that label and the accompanying legal-guarantee notice in a separate Implementing Regulation, (EU) 2025/1960, adopted on 25 September 2025, which applies from the same date as the directive. Nowhere in either text is there a carve-out for a garment, a bottle or a packaging run already printed with a now-banned claim before 27 September 2026.

The numbers behind 27 September

One number is how much of the transposition timetable member states have missed. One is how little time remains from today. The third is the minimum penalty floor EU law already sets for the kind of infringement a mislabeled claim can become once it crosses borders.

The real subject: a legal cutover with no grace period for physical inventory

Most coverage of the directive reads it as an advertising and marketing question: which words a brand can still put on a webpage or in a social post after 27 September. That framing misses where the harder problem actually sits, which is physical, not verbal. A hangtag, a printed carton, a screen-printed claim on a garment or a bottle cap embossed with a sustainability logo cannot be edited the way a webpage can. Neither the directive nor Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960 says what happens to a run of packaging manufactured, printed or already sitting on a retailer's shelf before the cutover date carrying a claim or a label that becomes banned the next day. That gap is real enough that the EU's own Consumer Protection Cooperation Network, the body that coordinates national enforcement authorities, felt the need to address it directly: in June 2026 it published a Common Understanding on 'old stock situations,' explicitly acknowledging that traders 'face genuine and specific transitional difficulties' and proposing pragmatic fixes, corrective stickers or point-of-sale notices, rather than requiring destruction of pre-existing stock. But the document is explicitly non-binding: it sets out principles for national authorities to consider, not a rule a brand can invoke as a defense. At least one country, Austria, has gone further and written an actual statutory transitional provision for old stock into its own transposition law. Most have not. The result is that the same box of unsold garments, carrying the same now-banned hangtag, can face a materially different legal reality in Vienna than in a member state that transposed the directive on time with no transition clause at all, or in one of the 20 still working through an open infringement file.

Why it matters for brands

The direct exposure sits with any brand selling physical goods into the EU that carries an environmental claim, a sustainability logo, or an extended durability guarantee on packaging, a hangtag, a product page or a point-of-sale display, apparel, footwear, cosmetics, homeware and electronics among the most exposed categories. Because Annex I's new items are a per se blacklist, the practical compliance question for 27 September is not whether a marketing team believes a claim is defensible; it is whether every claim printed on every physical SKU already sold or scheduled to ship into the EU has a documented, claim-specific substantiation file behind it, a company-wide assurance is not enough once the standard is per-product and per-claim. Because the directive's own text is silent on stock made before the cutover, and the one document that addresses it is non-binding guidance rather than law, a brand cannot assume the same fix, a corrective sticker at point of sale, a supplementary on-pack notice, will be treated the same way in every market it sells into: what is accepted as pragmatic enforcement in one member state may be a fresh infringement in another that transposed the directive without a transition clause, or in one still absent a finished national law altogether. A compliance team sourcing into the EU has three concrete tasks before 27 September: audit every environmental claim and sustainability label already printed on inventory bound for or sitting in EU warehouses; confirm, market by market, whether a national transitional provision for old stock exists or whether the June 2026 Common Understanding is the only cover available; and, for any guarantee running past two years, switch to the binding EU GARAN format set by Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/1960 rather than a bespoke label design.

Two ways to read 27 September

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