Which packaging claims are already unlawful in the EU today?

The provision hiding in plain sight

While attention has fixed on the Empowering Consumers Directive's September 2026 application and the blocked Green Claims Directive, a packaging-specific claims rule entered into application with almost no commentary: Article 14 of the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, applicable — like the regulation generally — from 12 August 2026 (Regulation (EU) 2025/40; European Commission, 2026; Fieldfisher, n.d.). It is short, structural, and stricter than most practitioners appear to realise: it conditions the lawfulness of environmental claims about regulated packaging properties on those claims exceeding the regulation's own minimum requirements, and it obliges the claimant to specify the claim's scope. Because the PPWR is a regulation, not a directive, the rule applies directly in every member state without transposition — which means that, at this article's verification date, it is already the law of the shelf.

This article sets out what Article 14 requires, why the "exceeds the minimum" architecture is a genuine novelty in claims law, how the provision interacts with the general claims regime, and what it renders unlawful today.

The text

Article 14, "Environmental claims", provides — in the text as retrieved from a regulatory-compliance mirror, the EUR-Lex primary page being too large to fetch in full (see verification note):

"Environmental claims as defined in Article 2, point (o), of Directive 2005/29/EC concerning packaging properties for which legal requirements are set out in this Regulation may be made in relation to packaging placed on the market if they fulfil the following requirements: (a) the claims are made only in relation to packaging properties exceeding the applicable minimum requirements set out in this Regulation, in accordance with the criteria, methodologies and calculation rules set out therein; and (b) the claims specify whether they relate to the packaging unit, part of the packaging unit or all packaging placed on the market by the economic operator. Compliance with the requirements set out in this Article shall be demonstrated in the technical documentation concerning the packaging as set out in Annex VII to this Regulation."

Three design elements do the work. The provision borrows its definition of "environmental claim" from the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive as amended — "any message or representation not mandatory under Union or national law... which states or implies that a product... has a positive or zero impact on the environment or is less damaging to the environment than other products... or has improved its impact over time" (Directive (EU) 2024/825, art. 2 point (o)) — so the two regimes share a subject matter by construction. It applies only to claims "concerning packaging properties for which legal requirements are set out in this Regulation" — recyclability, recycled content, minimisation, reusability, compostability: the regulation's own subject matter. And it is a permission with conditions: claims "may be made... if they fulfil" the requirements — the drafting form of a prohibition on every claim that does not.

The "exceeds the minimum" architecture

Condition (a) is the novelty. Claims law has always policed truth; Article 14 polices distinctiveness. A claim about a regulated packaging property is lawful only where the property exceeds what the regulation itself requires — measured, crucially, "in accordance with the criteria, methodologies and calculation rules set out" in the regulation, not by the claimant's chosen method.

The logic is the one the blacklist already applies to legal obligations generally — the Empowering Consumers Directive makes it per se unfair to present "requirements imposed by law on all products within the relevant product category... as a distinctive feature of the trader's offer" (Directive (EU) 2024/825, Annex I point 10a inserted into Directive 2005/29/EC) — but Article 14 radicalises it for packaging. Once the PPWR's recyclability grades, recycled-content minima and other requirements bind, every compliant package meets them; a claim that a package is recyclable, or contains recycled content, at the mandated level is a claim about the legal baseline dressed as a virtue. Article 14 anticipates this and forecloses it in advance: as the regulation's requirements phase in through 2030 and beyond, the space for lawful environmental claims about those same properties narrows to the margin above compliance.

The consequence deserves plain statement. In the EU, "recyclable" as an unqualified merit claim on packaging has a legislated expiry trajectory: when recyclability grading becomes a market-access condition (the Article 6 article), recyclability at the required grade becomes the floor, and only above-floor performance — claimed under the regulation's own methodology — remains claimable. The same holds for recycled content once Article 7's minima bind. Article 14 is, in effect, a scheduled sunset on the ordinary vocabulary of green packaging marketing, timed to the regulation's own escalation.

The scope condition

Condition (b) addresses a different deception: aggregation. A claim must "specify whether [it] relate[s] to the packaging unit, part of the packaging unit or all packaging placed on the market by the economic operator". The provision's targets are familiar from this library's third theme: the "100% recycled" bottle claim that silently excludes cap and label — the exact practice the CPC network extracted commitments over from Coca-Cola and Nestlé Waters (European Commission, n.d.) — and the portfolio-level claim ("all our packaging is recyclable") displayed on a single SKU whose own properties differ. After Article 14, the scope statement is not good practice but a condition of lawfulness: an unscoped claim about a regulated property fails condition (b) regardless of its truth.

The condition also quietly resolves a measurement question that content claims have long exploited: whether percentages may be averaged across lines. The permitted scopes — unit, part, or the operator's entire market placement — make averaging lawful only when declared as such, converting the choice of denominator from an accounting liberty into a disclosed term of the claim.

The documentation condition

The third element routes claims into the regulation's conformity machinery: compliance with Article 14 "shall be demonstrated in the technical documentation" under Annex VII. This is a larger change than it reads. General claims law obliges traders to hold substantiation, produced on demand; the PPWR obliges them to file it, in the same technical documentation that supports the packaging's conformity assessment, policed by market-surveillance authorities rather than consumer regulators. A packaging environmental claim in the EU is now, formally, an element of product compliance — auditable before any complaint exists, and defective documentation is itself the infringement. The enforcement consequences are correspondingly different: claims failures surface in conformity sweeps, not just consumer actions, and the actor exposed is the "economic operator" placing the packaging on the market — manufacturer, importer or distributor per the regulation's chain — rather than only the brand whose marketing chose the words.

What is unlawful today, precisely

Assembling the conditions, the claims already unlawful in the EU at this article's date include: any environmental claim about a PPWR-regulated packaging property that does not exceed the regulation's applicable minimum requirements, measured by the regulation's methodology; any such claim without a unit/part/portfolio scope statement; and any such claim not demonstrated in the technical documentation. To these, the general regime adds — from 27 September 2026 in the member states' application — the blacklisted practices examined elsewhere in this theme: uncertified sustainability badges, unsubstantiatable generic claims, offsetting-based neutrality claims (Directive (EU) 2024/825; the self-declared-labels article).

Two boundary observations complete the picture. Article 14 does not touch claims about properties the regulation does not regulate — a carbon-footprint figure, a sourcing mark, a social claim remain governed by the general regime alone. And it does not touch the regulation's own mandatory labels — the harmonised disposal marks, the compostability statements — which fall outside the "environmental claim" definition precisely because they are mandatory. The provision governs the voluntary margin, which is where marketing lives.

Article 14 beside its siblings

The provision's design becomes legible when set beside the two instruments it most resembles, one European and one French — each solving an adjacent version of the same problem.

The European sibling is the blacklist's law-as-virtue entry: the Empowering Consumers Directive makes it per se unfair to present "requirements imposed by law on all products within the relevant product category on the Union market as a distinctive feature of the trader's offer" (Directive (EU) 2024/825, Annex I point 10a). Point 10a and Article 14 share a premise — legal baselines are not marketing assets — but differ instructively in mechanism. The blacklist entry polices the presentation: it bites when the trader dresses compliance as distinction, and requires the enforcer to characterise the communication. Article 14 polices the arithmetic: the claim is unlawful unless the property measurably exceeds the regulation's minimum under the regulation's own methodology — a test computable from the technical file without any judgment about presentation. Where the blacklist asks how the claim reads, the packaging rule asks what the numbers are; the second is the more enforceable and the more constraining, and its arrival in sectoral law suggests which direction claim regulation travels once a sector acquires quantified baselines.

The French sibling shows the third available mechanism: vocabulary prohibition. France's anti-waste law bans specified words outright on products and packaging — "Il est interdit de faire figurer sur un produit ou un emballage les mentions 'biodégradable', 'respectueux de l'environnement' ou toute autre mention équivalente" — while separately requiring that recycled-content statements specify the actual incorporated percentage (Légifrance, 2020). The French approach needs no baseline and no misleadingness analysis: the words themselves are removed from the lawful lexicon. Set in sequence, the three instruments form a graduated scale of interventionism — prohibit the deceptive presentation (EU blacklist), prohibit the unearned claim (PPWR), prohibit the words (France) — and a multi-market package must clear all three, since the strictest applicable rule governs each market's artwork.

The comparison also clarifies Article 14's most distinctive feature: it is the only instrument of the three whose stringency escalates automatically. The blacklist's scope is fixed by its entries; the French list is fixed by its words; but Article 14's bite grows with every minimum requirement the packaging regulation phases in, because each new floor converts another tranche of claimable virtue into unclaimable compliance. The provision's drafters built a claims rule that tightens on the regulation's own schedule, with no further legislative act required — regulatory automation of a kind this library's enforcement theme encounters nowhere else.

Why nobody noticed

The provision's obscurity has structural causes worth recording. It sits in a 124-page regulation whose labeling attention concentrated on Article 12's harmonised marks; its subject matter reads as a restatement of familiar claims principles; and its bite is prospective — sharpest when the regulation's minima bind at the decade's turn. Commentary that did engage it frequently miscited it (the provision circulated in drafts under other numbers, and secondary sources still refer to "Article 11"), a small instance of the citation-decay problem this library documents across the field. The result is a compliance gap hiding in the open: packaging placed on the EU market since 12 August 2026 carries claims that the general regime tolerates and Article 14 does not — and the first coordinated sweep against them will find its targets already printed.

The provision's deeper interest, for this library, is architectural. Article 14 completes a triangle this theme traces: the UCPD polices deception (is the claim misleading?), the Empowering Consumers Directive polices form (is the badge certified? is the claim generic?), and the PPWR polices content against baseline (does the claimed property exceed what law already requires?). The third question is the one only sectoral law can ask, because only sectoral law sets the baseline — and its arrival in packaging suggests where every regulated product category's claims law is heading: toward a world in which the room for environmental marketing is, by construction, the distance between a product and its legal floor. Whether that room stays worth occupying — whether above-baseline performance can carry a claims economy — is a question the regulation's first compliance decade will answer, and this library will be measuring. The provision already in force is the experiment's first instrument; the shelf of August 2026 is its baseline reading, and the distance every later shelf travels from it will be Article 14's real measure.

References

Directive (EU) 2024/825 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 February 2024, OJ L, 2024/825, 6.3.2024. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

European Commission (n.d.) Sustainable consumption actions (CPC coordinated actions overview). Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

European Commission (2026) Commission Notice — Guidance document for Regulation (EU) 2025/40, OJ C, 2026. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 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), article 13. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Fieldfisher (n.d.) Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation — how compliance works. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).

Regulation (EU) 2025/40 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 December 2024 on packaging and packaging waste, OJ L, 2025/40, 22.1.2025. Article 14 text as mirrored at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026). Primary text: Open source

Note on sources and verification

The verbatim text of Article 14 is quoted from a regulatory-compliance mirror of the Official Journal text, the EUR-Lex HTML of the full regulation being too large to retrieve in this library's environment; the standing limitation on PPWR article-level retrieval is documented in this library's method note, and readers should verify the article against the ELI record (Open source) before onward citation. The regulation's entry into force (11 February 2025) and general application date (12 August 2026) are confirmed by the Commission's 2026 guidance notice as cited, and Article 14's application from the general date is corroborated by the Fieldfisher analysis. The definition of "environmental claim" is verbatim from Directive (EU) 2024/825 as retrieved from EUR-Lex. The characterisation of the provision as little-commented, and the observation that secondary sources have cited it under other article numbers, reflect this library's survey of the commentary and are offered as observations. The account of which specific current claims fail the provision is legal analysis by this library, not an enforcement record; no Article 14 enforcement action had been identified at the verification date.

Last verified: 18 August 2026.