Greenwashing Under the Scrutiny of UOKiK – What Do the New Regulations Change?

What Is Greenwashing?

Greenwashing refers to misleading claims by businesses regarding environmental sustainability, used in commercial communication, advertising slogans, graphics, product names, labels, or marketing narratives.

What Does UOKiK Expect from Companies? The Most Common Errors

Over the past year, the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) has brought charges of greenwashing against several large entities across various industries. Based on their analysis, it is possible to identify the most common errors in communicating environmental activities by businesses, including:

• Extending limited actions to the entire operation – actual environmentally friendly measures apply only to part of the offering, while the communication suggests they concern the entire business.
• General slogans lacking precision – the use of terms such as “eco”, “environmentally neutral”, or “zero-emission” without indicating scope, conditions, and limitations.
• Selective data – basing communication on a single stage or metric while disregarding the scale of operations and the full life cycle of the product or service.
• Assumptions instead of facts – building an environmental narrative based on assumptions about consumer behaviour without verification.
• Concealing conditions – key limitations of “green” claims are communicated in an unclear or marginal manner.
• Pressure on consumers – suggesting that choosing an alternative option is less environmentally friendly without evidence of a real difference in impact.

The conclusions from analysing these errors are clear: when communicating environmental initiatives, a business should precisely define which part of the product or activity they concern, indicate their actual scope, and base the communication on clearly identifiable and verifiable grounds.

What Will the New Regulations Change and How Can Companies Protect Themselves?

The allegations brought by the President of UOKiK against businesses to date can be treated as an indication of the direction in which market regulation is heading. With the entry into force of the act implementing Directive 2024/825, companies’ obligations regarding the communication of environmental impact will be significantly clarified. This means that what is currently assessed based on general principles of fairness and misleading conduct will soon become a specific and explicit legal obligation. The new regulations will substantially facilitate the President of UOKiK in directly bringing charges against businesses that fail to comply with the new standards. The changes are targeted in nature but significantly increase the regulatory risk associated with marketing communications.

The most important consequences for businesses include:

• a prohibition on the use of general environmental claims where the business cannot demonstrate recognised high environmental performance;
• a prohibition on using proprietary “eco” labels that are not based on recognised certification systems (such as EMAS or EU Ecolabel) or established by public authorities;
• the inability to base climate neutrality claims solely on offsetting mechanisms without demonstrating actual emission reductions;
• a prohibition on presenting obligations arising from legal provisions as additional advantages of a product or service.

In practice, the new regulations will mean that environmental communication will cease to be an area of “soft” marketing and will instead become subject to strict legal assessment. For businesses, this entails the need to prepare in advance for more rigorous and precise enforcement by the consumer protection authority. In Poland, as well as in all EU Member States, the new regulations must be applied no later than 27 September this year.

How to Prepare?

Preparing for the new regulatory landscape primarily requires organising the way in which a company communicates its environmental activities. The starting point should be a reliable verification of which elements of the business are genuinely environmentally friendly, to what extent, and on the basis of what data this can be substantiated.

It is also essential to move away from general, slogan-based declarations in favour of specificity. If a business refers to “environmental sustainability”, it should clearly explain what this relates to, what the limitations are, and whether it concerns a product, service, process, or only a selected stage of activity.

Greenwashing is no longer merely a reputational issue—it is increasingly becoming a real legal and financial risk that should be taken into account when planning communication strategies.