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France: what did AGEC ban on pack, and what did the carbon-neutrality decree change?
Status
In force. Two separate French instruments bite on packaging claims: Environment Code L.541-9-1 (AGEC mentions ban, from 1 January 2022) and Decree 2022-539 (carbon-neutrality advertising conditions, from 1 January 2023). DGCCRF enforces the consumer-law overlay. This is legislation, not a scheme. EmpCo’s offset blacklist, from 27 September 2026, is a third and later layer, treated in the climate-neutral article.
biodégradable · respectueux de l’environnementPrescribed, banned or litigated wording — not production artwork
compostable (industrial only)Prescribed, banned or litigated wording — not production artwork
neutre en carbonePrescribed, banned or litigated wording — not production artwork
Wording lock-ups record prescribed, banned or litigated phrases for identification and commentary. They are not production artwork and do not grant permission to print.
Two instruments, not one
France is the only large market in this theme that has written a list of environmental words that must not appear on a product or a package, and a separate, later, conditions-based regime for carbon-neutrality advertising. The two are routinely collapsed. They are not the same article, they do not share a start date, and they are not the Triman duty documented in the France country report.
L.541-9-1, inserted by the AGEC law (loi n° 2020-105 of 10 February 2020) and in force for the mentions ban from 1 January 2022, forbids placing on a product or a package the mentions “biodégradable”, “respectueux de l’environnement”, or any equivalent mention. Plastic products or packaging compostable only in industrial units may not bear “compostable”. Those compostable in home or industrial composting must bear “Ne pas jeter dans la nature” (Code de l’environnement, L.541-9-1; France country report). A Seedling or OK compost INDUSTRIAL mark does not authorise the French word “compostable” on an industrial-only SKU. The word is the violation. Administrative fines for related information duties sit in L.541-9-4 at a ceiling of €3,000 for a natural person and €15,000 for a legal person — a different, and much smaller, scale from the carbon-neutrality advertising penalties.
The carbon-neutrality decree
Decree n° 2022-539 of 13 April 2022, adopted under the Climate and Resilience Law, governs advertising that a product or service is carbon-neutral, or equivalent wording. It has applied from 1 January 2023. The ecological-transition ministry’s public summary is the operational statement: advertisers may not assert carbon neutrality in an advertisement without a greenhouse-gas report for the product or service over its whole life cycle (ISO 14067 or equivalent, kept current annually); without a hierarchy that avoids emissions first, then reduces them, then compensates; without a reduction trajectory of at least ten years, updated every five, with no increase in unit emissions between two years; without compensation through projects meeting the minima in Environment Code L.229-55; and without annual publication of a report on those points, with a link accessible on the advertising medium or the packaging (Ministère de la Transition écologique, n.d.; Légifrance, 2022a).
That is a conditions regime, not a blacklist. A French pack that carries “neutre en carbone” plus a working link to a conforming report is inside Decree 2022-539 if the other conditions are met. It is not thereby inside Union law after 27 September 2026. Directive (EU) 2024/825 inserts into the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive a per se prohibition on claiming, based on the offsetting of greenhouse-gas emissions, that a product has a neutral, reduced or positive GHG impact. That blacklist is treated in the climate-neutral article. From the application date, a pack that satisfied the French decree by offsetting residual emissions and publishing the report still makes an Annex I point 4c practice if the verdict claim is product-level and offset-based. The French conditions do not survive as a defence to the Union blacklist; they remain the national rule for any carbon-neutrality advertising that is not that blacklisted practice.
Penalties for breach of the advertising conditions are set by Decree n° 2022-538 of 13 April 2022: an administrative fine of €20,000 for a natural person and €100,000 for a legal person, which may reach the total cost of the advertising operation (Ministère de la Transition écologique, n.d.). Those figures are the carbon-advertising scale, not the AGEC mentions scale.
DGCCRF as the enforcer
The Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes is the consumer-protection authority that has made French greenwashing visible as a volume of inspections rather than a handful of test cases. The Climate and Resilience Law also amended Consumption Code L.121-2 so that false or misleading claims about a product’s environmental impact, or about the advertiser’s commitments, are unfair commercial practices (Ministère de la Transition écologique, n.d.). AGEC’s word-list and the carbon-neutrality decree sit on top of that general prohibition, they do not replace it.
The 2023–24 campaign is the figure this library already uses elsewhere: more than 3,000 establishments inspected, more than 430 injunctions, more than 70 administrative fines or criminal referrals (Gossement Avocats, 2025; consistent with later summaries of the same DGCCRF review). Typical findings, as reported, include unverifiable generic claims (“éco-responsable”, “biodégradable”), self-created labels without a third-party audit, and certification marks invoked beyond their scope. The campaign is complaint-and-sweep enforcement of the kind mapped in the who-enforces article, not artwork pre-clearance. A pack that has already been sold is not un-printed by an injunction.
What a printer should take
| Field | Rule |
|---|---|
| Banned on product or pack | “Biodégradable”, “respectueux de l’environnement”, and equivalent mentions (L.541-9-1, from 1 January 2022). Industrial-only “compostable” on plastic products or packaging. |
| Required on dual-compostable plastic | “Ne pas jeter dans la nature” — a warning, not a compostability boast. |
| Carbon-neutral advertising | Lawful from 1 January 2023 only with ISO 14067-equivalent LCA, avoid/reduce/compensate hierarchy, ten-year reduction trajectory, qualifying offsets, annual public report, and a link on the medium or the pack (Decree 2022-539). |
| Union overlay from 27 Sep 2026 | Offset-based product climate-neutral / climate-positive / reduced-GHG claims are blacklisted by EmpCo Annex I point 4c, whatever the French report says. |
| Sorting mark is separate | Triman/Info-tri is a mandatory sorting panel, not a green claim, and is not a licence for any of the words above. |
| Penalties (order of magnitude) | AGEC information duties: €3,000 / €15,000 (L.541-9-4). Carbon-neutrality advertising: €20,000 / €100,000, up to the cost of the operation (Decree 2022-538). Misleading claims: Consumption Code overlay, DGCCRF. |
Traps
The first trap is treating Triman as the French claims regime. Triman tells the consumer which bin; L.541-9-1 tells the producer which words are forbidden. A pack can be required to carry one and forbidden to carry the other. The second is treating Decree 2022-539 as either a total ban or a perpetual safe harbour. It is neither, and EmpCo will occupy the offset-based product-claim ground from 27 September 2026. The third is importing a Seedling, OK compost or “climate-neutral” lock-up that is routine in another market and assuming a French SKU can keep the word. Certification is not a defence to a statutory mentions ban, a point developed in the certification article. Case C-249/26 (Commission v France) challenges the Triman duty, not L.541-9-1; it is not a suspension of the claims rules.
References
Code de l’environnement Article L.541-9-1 (banned mentions).. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 22 August 2026).
Code de l’environnement Article L.541-9-4 (penalties).. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 22 August 2026).
Légifrance (2020) Loi n° 2020-105 du 10 février 2020 relative à la lutte contre le gaspillage et à l’économie circulaire (AGEC).. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 22 August 2026).
Légifrance (2022a) Décret n° 2022-539 du 13 avril 2022 relatif à la compensation carbone et aux allégations de neutralité carbone dans la publicité.. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 22 August 2026).
Ministère de la Transition écologique (n.d.) La lutte contre l’éco-blanchiment dans les publicités.. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 22 August 2026).
Directive (EU) 2024/825 OJ L, 2024/825, 6.3.2024.. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 22 August 2026).
Gossement Avocats (2025) as cited in this library’s getting-oriented articles for the 2023–24 DGCCRF inspection totals.. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 22 August 2026).
Note on sources and verification
L.541-9-1 wording, the industrial-only compostable prohibition, the “Ne pas jeter dans la nature” duty and the 1 January 2022 mentions-ban date are as stated in the France country report, which rests on the Legifrance article and on Citeo/AGEC operational reading; the Legifrance HTML of L.541-9-1 was not re-retrieved in this pass (the site returned 403 to the crawler) and is cited at the stable article URL. Decree 2022-539’s existence, date and subject-matter are from Légifrance’s JORF record. The operational conditions (ISO 14067, hierarchy, ten-year trajectory, L.229-55 offsets, annual report, link on medium or packaging) and the Decree 2022-538 penalty figures are from the ecological-transition ministry’s eco-blanchiment page as retrieved on 22 August 2026. EmpCo Annex I point 4c is from the EUR-Lex HTML of Directive (EU) 2024/825. DGCCRF 2023–24 totals are the figures already used in this library, attributed to Gossement Avocats (2025); an official DGCCRF HTML bilan was not retrieved for this article and the numbers are not re-derived. Case C-249/26 is characterised only as a Triman challenge, consistent with the France report.
Last verified: 22 August 2026.