In March 2022, the European Commission adopted a package of measures, including the Proposal for a ‘Directive empowering consumers in the green transition’ (amending the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive - COM(2022) 143 final). The idea of this Proposal is to improve the participation of consumers in the circular economy and to foster sustainable consumption (through additional prohibitions on certain unfair practices such as greenwashing and through additional information requirements). Imposing mandatory information requirements on businesses and ensuring the non-misleading character of voluntary information provision by businesses are classic tools of consumer protection. Yet, the Commission Proposals are innovative in that they bring in environmental protection as a public interest into Directives that were up until now focused merely on the protection of the collective interests of consumers and internal market building.
Bert Keirsbilck (KU Leuven) talked about the state of play of this Proposal both in the Council of the European Union (6th compromise text, Swedish presidency) and in the European Parliament (with the Borzan Report adopted on 28 March 2023 in IMCO), ahead of the trialogue which is about to start early May 2023. A lot of technical comments were made (eg lack of definitions, verbosity, etc). Yet, a major challenge is to ensure coherent links between the future Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (COM(2022) 142 final), the amended Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, the future Green Claims Directive (COM(2023) 156 final), the amended Consumer Rights Directive, the Sale of Goods Directive, the Digital Content/Services Directive and the future Repair of Goods Directive (COM(2023) 155 final). Fundamentally, the question is how to design a more sustainable consumer law, in concert with product legislation and waste law.
The seminar was followed by a lively Q&A session.
More details are available here.
The recording of the seminar is available below.