Rules For Sustainability Communication Are Becoming Stricter

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Rules For Sustainability Communication Are Becoming Stricter

Claims regarding sustainability and environmental performance have become a defining part of corporate communications in recent years. Terms such as “eco-friendly,” “sustainable,” “green,” “climate-neutral,” or “recyclable” now appear on numerous products, packaging, websites, and advertisements. However, starting September 27, 2026, stricter requirements will apply to the use of such claims. With the entry into force of the Hungarian transposition of the EU’s EmpCo Directive, the Act on Unfair Commercial Practices toward Consumers (Fttv.) will be amended, and several sustainability-related practices will be added to the so-called “blacklist” included in the Act’s annex. The transposing law was promulgated on December 16, 2025, giving businesses just over 9 months to prepare. However, once the law takes effect, there will be no grace period for complying with the new requirements. Although the Hungarian Competition Authority (GVH) had previously investigated several of the practices included on the blacklist, the new EU rules now mandate zero tolerance for these deceptive practices. This is because blacklisted practices are, in every case—by virtue of the law and regardless of the circumstances—classified as unfair commercial practices. In cases involving a blacklisted practice, the only requirement for establishing a violation is to determine whether the elements of the offense set forth in the law have been met; the GVH does not examine, as part of its assessment of the violation, whether the consumer’s transactional decision was influenced by the practice in question.

The Specific Communication Practices Added to the Blacklist

Of the 12 new unfair commercial practices, we present in detail below those involving classic “green” claims. The regulation also introduces new, similarly strict requirements in other areas—such as transparent communication regarding software updates, as well as claims about the durability and reparability of products—which are not covered in this article.

General Claims Regarding Environmental Friendliness

A key element of the new regulation is the treatment of general environmental claims. A business may not make a general environmental claim unless it can demonstrate recognized excellence in environmental performance to support that claim. According to the law, a claim is considered “general” if it does not appear on a sustainability label and the detailed supporting evidence for the claim is not presented clearly and prominently on the same communication medium—for example, on the same packaging or in the same advertisement.

This can be significant in practice because the meaning of terms such as “green,” “environmentally friendly,” or “sustainable” is, in and of itself, quite broad. Green advertising claims that are phrased too broadly may be difficult or impossible to interpret on their own, or may even have multiple different meanings for consumers. Vague and general claims often fail to make it clear exactly what the advertiser is communicating regarding the environmental benefits of the product or the company’s operations. As a result, consumers may interpret the claim differently from the message the company intends to convey. The advertisement must therefore make it clear to which aspect of the product, service, or business operations—or its corporate responsibility program—the green claim applies.

A partial benefit does not necessarily imply a general environmental benefit

Another important issue under the regulations is what general conclusions can be drawn about a product’s or company’s overall environmental performance based on a single favorable environmental characteristic. For example, a product may contain a component or packaging that is recyclable or made from recycled materials. However, this alone does not necessarily mean that the entire product can be classified as environmentally friendly or sustainable. For this reason, the regulations classify as an unfair commercial practice the application of a claim regarding environmental friendliness to the entire product or to the entirety of a business’s operations if the claim pertains only to a specific aspect of the product or a specific operation of the business.

This approach is not entirely new in Hungarian regulatory practice. In previous proceedings, the GVH has also examined what overall impression highlighting a product’s positive environmental attribute creates for consumers: In the summer of 2024, it launched three competition authority proceedings examining green claims related to PET bottles against Fonte Viva/MOL, Szentkirályi Magyarország, and the Coca-Cola Group; all of these proceedings were concluded in 2026.

A common feature of all three cases was that the claims used by the companies under investigation (such as “100% rePET,” “Bottle to Bottle, 25% RePET,” or “100% recyclable”) were based on a verifiable, partial fact—typically the recycled content of the bottle’s raw material—but the GVH’s concern was not with the factual accuracy of these claims, but rather with the overall impression created by the communication: consumers could have interpreted the statements as applying to the product as a whole (such as the label, the cap, or the packaging’s lack of environmental impact in general), even though the companies could actually only substantiate a specific, narrower characteristic. The GVH did not find any violations in any of the cases; however, the companies involved made significant commitments: they introduced internal green marketing compliance programs and training, reviewed their communication practices, and committed to providing consumers with more information (for example, through educational campaigns or the regular publication of recycling data). The common lesson from these three cases is that the assessment of environmental claims goes beyond whether individual facts can be verified: what matters is the overall impression that the communication as a whole creates in the consumer’s mind regarding the product’s environmental characteristics. This consideration takes on increased significance in light of the stricter rules that will take effect on September 27, 2026.

Regulations on the Use of Sustainability Labels

In addition to the verbal elements of communication, the new regulations also cover the presentation of claims regarding environmental friendliness in visual, graphic, or symbolic forms. Businesses often use various trust marks, quality marks, labels, logos, symbols, and certifications intended to emphasize that the business’s product, service, activity, or operation possesses some positive environmental characteristic. Under the new regulations, the use of such sustainability labels is lawful only if they are based on a certification system or have been introduced by a government authority. This ensures that all such labels have consistent content or a verified basis.

Separate rules apply to claims based on emissions offsetting.

The new regulation classifies as an unfair commercial practice—and prohibits—the practice whereby a business claims, based on carbon offsetting, that a product is carbon-neutral, has a moderate impact, or has a positive impact on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. This is important because emissions reduction, carbon credits, and offsetting are increasingly part of companies’ sustainability communications; however, claims regarding these matters should not be conflated with commercial communications about actual environmental impact.

The changes do not affect marketing communications alone

One important consequence of the rules taking effect on September 27 is that the use of certain terms previously common in marketing language will require greater caution. Although the new regulations on sustainability communication focus on commercial communications directed at consumers, the practical implications may extend beyond this scope. This is because formulating a legally valid environmental claim typically requires collaboration across multiple corporate functions: for this very reason, product development, procurement, manufacturing, quality assurance, ESG, and, in some cases, the supply chain may all be involved in ensuring compliance with the regulations.

This change is therefore not simply the next step in the fight against “greenwashing.” For businesses, it also means that sustainability claims are more closely tied than ever to the underlying data, performance, and verifiability. The business value of sustainability communication may remain significant, but the legal assessment of environmental claims made in such communication is becoming increasingly inseparable from their actual content and substantiation.