doc__table__202

For example: — Claim that electric car hire is ‘ecological’ can be found misleading without providing information to put the claim into perspective. In particular, if the electricity needed to recharge the cars does not come from renewable energy sources, the car hire service would still have a negative impact on the environment (302). — Traders increasingly make claims about carbon neutrality by investing in projects that compensate for CO2 emissions. For example, a car rental company offers consumers the possibility to ‘drive CO2 neutral’ by choosing an option that compensates for emissions. This practice may be problematic if the underlying carbon credits are of low environmental integrity or are not accounted for appropriately, so that they do not represent real and additional emission reductions. Carbon removals claims should be authentic, robust, transparent, reported, monitorable, verifiable, credible, certified, should not undermine near-term emission reduction action in emitting sectors, should guarantee additionality and should ensure an appropriate accounting of carbon removals in national GHG inventories. A national consumer authority considered in its guidelines that consumers should be properly informed about the functioning of the measures that compensate for CO2 emissions, such as the number of kilometres that are fully compensated and the manner in which this is achieved, how and where the compensation is accounted for (303). — A court considered that the marketing of hair and skin care products, where the trader had stated that their products are organic with claims such as ‘eco’ and ‘organic’, were vague and without clear qualifications. The court also assessed that it is not clear enough with only the graphic symbol/logo/label of a third-party certification label as a qualification of what organic and/or eco means (304). — A trader advertised the sale of bags of sweets by stating that for each bag sold, it would plant one tree. However, the trader had already agreed to plant a certain number of trees, independently from the number of bags of sweets sold. A national court upheld a claim by the relevant ombudsman that this statement qualified as misleading advertising which took advantage of the credulity of consumers who were concerned about the environment (305).

← sec_3_8__para__3 · All articles · 4 ANWENDUNG DER UGPRL AUF BESTIMMTE SEKTOREN →

Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-09-25 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.