Lee Green

From today, 27 September 2026, a lot of familiar green marketing becomes a legal problem in the EU. The Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive (ECGT, sometimes called EmpCo) now applies. It amends the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. That matters, because it means certain claims are no longer judged case by case. They are conditionally banned. Most of the attention over the last two years went to the Green Claims Directive. That stalled in 2025. ECGT didn't. It was...

Back in June I wrote about what happens when someone asks an AI assistant whether your company is any good on sustainability. It doesn't hand over your neatly worded page. It reads what it can find, breaks your claim into parts, and rebuilds an answer from whatever survives. Specific, evidenced claims tend to make it through that process. Vague ones get hollowed out. At the time, that was an argument, not a measurement. I could tell you the mechanism. I couldn't tell you which of your pages...

Nearly half of consumers no longer believe the sustainability claims they read, and new research shows scepticism causes disengagement rather than scrutiny. Here's what that means for how you communicate, and what actually rebuilds trust.