- Ask a model for product copy and it reaches for eco friendly, sustainable and natural, because those words appear constantly in the text it learned from.
- Those are the exact words regulators treat as unsupported unless you can prove the specific benefit behind them.
- EU member states had to transpose the empowering consumers directive by 27 March 2026 and apply the measures from 27 September 2026.
- Under it a trader can no longer declare a product green or environmentally friendly without demonstrating it, and unreliable voluntary sustainability logos are out too.
- The FTC's guides are older and more specific. Biodegradable means complete breakdown within one year, and recyclable needs qualifying when facilities reach fewer than 60 percent of consumers where you sell.
- The fix is a search of your own catalogue for about eight adjectives, and it is a morning's work rather than a project.
There is a particular sentence that appears in AI drafted product copy with remarkable consistency. Made from sustainable materials, it says, or crafted with eco friendly processes, or simply this natural product. Nobody asked for the claim. The model supplied it because product descriptions on the internet are full of it, and a model writes what the genre expects.
That habit is now a compliance problem with a date attached. From 27 September 2026 the rules across the European Union change on exactly those words, and the American guidance that already covered them is considerably more specific than most sellers realise.
The good news is that this is one of the few compliance tasks that genuinely is small. You are looking for a short list of adjectives in text you already own.
Why does AI reach for these words unprompted?
Because the training data is saturated with them, and because the instruction it was given was almost certainly to write appealing copy. Appealing product copy in the last decade contains environmental adjectives, so the model supplies them, in the same way it supplies premium and handcrafted.
The difference is that premium is puffery and eco friendly is a factual claim about the product. A regulator reading your page does not care that a machine wrote it, and neither does the framework: the trader making the offer is responsible for the statement. A generated sentence is your sentence the moment it is published.
This is the same structural issue as any AI drafted claim about your business, which we covered for the AI adjective itself in what you can actually say about the AI in your product. Environmental wording is the harder version, because the standards are written down in detail and the burden sits on you.
What changes in the EU on 27 September 2026?
The Directive on empowering consumers for the green transition starts to bite. The European Commission's page on sustainable consumption records the timetable: the directive was adopted on 28 February 2024, member states had until 27 March 2026 to transpose it, and it enters into application from 27 September 2026. The Commission also published a questions and answers document for stakeholders on 30 June 2026.
Structurally it amends two existing pieces of consumer law rather than creating a separate regime, the Consumer Rights Directive and the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. That matters more than it sounds. It means these obligations arrive inside the unfair practices rules your national consumer authority already enforces, rather than in a new instrument with its own separate enforcement machinery.
On the substance, the Commission's announcement when the rules entered into force is blunt: vague environmental claims will be forbidden, so companies will no longer be able to declare that they are green or environmentally friendly if they cannot demonstrate it, and it will also be forbidden to display unreliable voluntary sustainability logos. Separately, unfair practices connected to early obsolescence are prohibited.
The logo point catches small shops who would never write a claim themselves. A badge in your footer, a leaf icon beside a product, a self designed seal that says eco choice: each is a claim in graphical form, and a self awarded one has no certification scheme behind it.
What do the American rules already require?
More precision than almost anyone applies. The FTC's summary of the Green Guides starts from the same place as the EU directive: marketers should not make broad, unqualified general environmental benefit claims such as green or eco friendly, because broad claims are difficult to substantiate if not impossible. The remedy is to qualify a general claim with the specific benefit, clearly and prominently.
Beyond that headline the guides get specific in ways that make excellent copy rules, because each one converts a vague word into a testable fact.
| Word AI writes | What the FTC guides require | What to write instead |
|---|---|---|
| Eco friendly, green | Do not make it unqualified, since a general benefit claim is close to impossible to substantiate | The specific attribute, such as the packaging material or a named certification |
| Biodegradable | Unqualified only if the entire item breaks down and returns to nature within one year of customary disposal | Nothing, if the item goes to landfill, where it will not degrade in a year |
| Recyclable | Qualify it where recycling facilities are unavailable to at least 60 percent of consumers where you sell | This product may not be recyclable in your area, where access is limited |
| Non toxic | Competent and reliable scientific evidence that it is safe for people and for the environment | The tested property you actually hold a result for |
| Free of X | Only trace or background amounts, no consumer relevant harm, and the substance not added deliberately | Nothing, if the substance was never associated with the category anyway |
| Carbon neutral | Evidence for offsets, and disclosure where the reductions will not occur for at least two years | The measured figure and the scheme, or silence |
Read the free of row twice. The guides say it can be deceptive to advertise a product as free of a substance that was never associated with that product category in the first place. Models produce exactly this kind of sentence, because it sounds reassuring and costs nothing to write.
A third party certification does not transfer the burden. The FTC guidance states that a marketer holding one still has to substantiate all express and implied claims, and that seals may themselves be endorsements, so a material connection to the certifying body has to be disclosed. Buying a badge is not the same as having evidence.
What about the certifications and seals themselves?
They are the fastest growing version of this problem and the least examined. The guides make two demands that most small shops fail without noticing.
The first is that a seal should clearly convey the basis for the certification. A green leaf with a word under it conveys approval without conveying what was assessed, which is precisely the failure. If your badge does not say what was measured, it is decoration that reads as evidence.
The second is the material connection. If you paid the certifying organisation, or have any relationship that could affect the credibility of the endorsement, that connection has to be disclosed. Membership schemes where a fee produces a logo sit squarely in this territory.
The EU side is simpler and stricter: a voluntary sustainability logo that is not based on a certification scheme is the kind of unreliable label the new rules push out. If you designed the badge yourself, it goes.
What about compostable and renewable energy claims?
Both appear often in generated copy and both have requirements that are stricter than the everyday meaning of the word.
For compostable, the guides ask for competent and reliable scientific evidence that all materials in the product or package will break down into usable compost safely and in roughly the same time as the materials they are composted with. Two qualifications follow. If the item cannot be composted at home safely or in a timely way, say so. If it needs a municipal or institutional facility and those are not available to a substantial majority of consumers, say that too. A great deal of packaging marketed as compostable needs industrial conditions that most buyers cannot reach.
Renewable energy claims have a trap of their own. The guides say a marketer should not make an unqualified renewable energy claim based on energy derived from fossil fuels unless they buy renewable energy certificates to match that use. They also warn that an unqualified renewable energy claim may be read as a claim about renewable or recycled materials, which is a different assertion entirely. Naming the source, solar or wind rather than renewable, removes both problems in a single word.
There is a broader principle underneath these and it is the one to remember when a specific rule is not to hand. Where a qualified general claim implies an overall environmental benefit because of one attribute, the guides expect the trade offs to be analysed. Their own example is telling: claiming green because of recycled content may still be deceptive if the environmental costs of using that content outweigh the benefits. A single good attribute does not make a product green, and saying so is the claim that gets challenged.
Who is responsible when the supplier wrote the claim?
You are, for what appears on your page. That is worth stating plainly because the usual reaction to this subject is that the manufacturer said it, so the manufacturer owns it.
Supplier documentation is evidence, and good evidence, but it is not a transfer of responsibility. If a wholesaler's sheet says eco friendly and you copy that into your listing, you have made the claim to your customer. The useful move is to treat supplier material as a source to interrogate rather than text to paste: ask what specific property the word refers to, and ask for the document that establishes it.
That request also functions as a supplier filter. A manufacturer who can immediately produce a material breakdown, a certificate number or a test result is a different proposition from one who cannot explain what their own adjective means. The ones who cannot are the ones whose claims will eventually become your problem.
Keep whatever comes back. An environmental claim you can support with a dated document from a named supplier is defensible even if it later turns out to be wrong, because the question a regulator asks first is what basis you had at the time.
How do you find every claim you have already published?
Search, do not read. The words are few and they are distinctive, which makes this a mechanical job rather than an editorial one.
Export your product copy and search for the following across all of it: green, eco, sustainable, natural, biodegradable, compostable, recyclable, carbon, renewable, non toxic, chemical free, plastic free, and the word friendly which catches environmentally friendly and its variants. Include product titles, bullet points, category descriptions, your about page, packaging text and any email templates. The claims made in marketing emails are the ones most often forgotten, because nobody thinks of a newsletter as a product page.
For each hit, ask what specific property of the product the word was doing the job of. Usually there is one, and it is better copy than the adjective was. Recycled cardboard packaging beats eco friendly packaging on precision and on persuasion, and it is a statement you can support with a supplier document.
Where there is no specific property behind the word, delete the sentence. That is the whole decision, and it is much faster than trying to write a qualification for a claim that was never grounded in anything.
Two places tend to survive the sweep and should not. Old blog posts sit on the same domain and make the same claims, and they are frequently the pages an answer engine quotes when summarising your brand. And image files carry text: a badge burned into a product photograph or a banner will not appear in any text search, so the catalogue images need a visual pass rather than a query.
Budget an hour for a catalogue of a few hundred products. The searching is quick and the thinking is concentrated in a handful of items, because most shops use the same three phrases everywhere. Once you have decided what recycled cardboard packaging should say, you have decided it for the whole catalogue.
How do you stop the copy coming back?
Put the constraint in the instruction rather than in the review. A prompt that ends with a line forbidding environmental or sustainability adjectives unless they appear in the supplied product data will not produce them, because the model was only supplying them to satisfy the genre.
Then keep the evidence next to the product rather than in a folder somewhere. If the certification, the material specification or the test result lives as a field on the product record, the person or the system writing copy has something true to draw on and the check becomes a lookup. This is the same argument as for any other compliance field, and it is why an automated listing check works on structured data and fails on prose.
The drafting discipline that prevents the whole class of problem is narrow: give the model facts and let it arrange them, rather than asking it to describe a product it knows nothing about. We set that method out in how to draft product descriptions that stay factual, and green claims are the clearest demonstration of why it matters.
Is this worth doing before the date?
Yes, for a reason that has nothing to do with enforcement risk. Nobody is going to fine a small shop on 28 September for the word eco in a bullet point. Consumer authorities work on complaints and on sweeps, and a single trader with vague adjectives is not where they start.
The reason to do it now is that specific claims sell better than vague ones, and this exercise forces you to find the specific version. A shop that replaces sustainably made with made from 80 percent recycled aluminium in a factory we name has not just complied. It has written better copy, given the customer something to verify, and made the page more useful to the answer engines that increasingly summarise product pages for buyers.
There is also a durability argument. Vague claims age badly and specific ones do not. A page saying eco friendly in 2021 looks evasive in 2026, whereas a page naming a material and a percentage reads exactly the same way it did when it was written.
None of this requires new software. It requires being able to export your catalogue, search it, and edit it in bulk, which is a reasonable thing to check your platform can actually do before you need it. If you are choosing one, that capability is worth more than most of the features on the comparison page, and it is part of why we argue for owning the store you sell from in what an AI built storefront gives you over a rented one.
Find the adjectives. Name the attribute behind each one. Keep what you can prove.