The European Commission has announced two new green-proposals. The first focuses on product repairs, introducing new consumer rights allowing for easy and attractive repairs; with the second proposing a common criteria against greenwashing, misleading environment environmental claims, aiming to offer more sustainable choices for consumers.
Barcelona’s European Commission spokesperson, Carlota Martí, claimed these proposals will help the EU to reach the objectives of the European Green Deal.
The so-called “right to repair” proposal, aims to ensure that more products are repaired within the legal guarantee, and that consumers have easier and cheaper options to repair products that are technically reparable even when legal guarantee has expired.
“Over the last decades, replacement has often been prioritised over repair whenever products become defective, and insufficient incentives have been given to make it easier and more cost effective for consumers to repair as opposed to replace goods. This proposal will put an end to this trend,” the Commission claims.
Moving on to the second proposal, Martí noted that a 2020 Commission study highlighted 53.3 percent of examined environmental claims in the EU were found to be vague, misleading, or unfounded, and 40 percent were as unsubstantiated.
“The absence of common rules for companies making voluntary green claims leads to what we know as greenwashing and creates an unequal playing field in the EU market to the disadvantage of genuinely sustainable companies.”
In the proposal presented by the European Commission, when companies choose to make a green claim about their products or service, they will have to respect a minimum norm on how they substantiate this claim, and how they communicate them.
“This is a big step for us, and also for our planet,” the spokesperson stated. “As always, the EU wants to lead the way in the fight to reach a greener planet and our ambition to become the first Climate Neutral continent by 2050.”
Stella Gordon