Parliament’s vote on Green Claims Directive: IFOAM Organics Europe welcomes efforts to curb greenwashing and the acknowledgement of specific environmental assessment needs for agri-food
BRUSSELS, 12 MARCH 2024 – IFOAM Organics Europe welcomes today’s plenary vote on the directive on green claims. This directive aims to prevent greenwashing, an objective that IFOAM Organics Europe fully shares.
Jan Plagge, President of IFOAM Organics Europe said “IFOAM Organics Europe fully supports the fight against greenwashing and welcomes the Parliament’s view that the respect of planetary boundaries should also be considered when assessing environmental claims. Plagge added “It is crucial that the European Parliament has recognised that for some product groups, the PEF method is not suitable for providing a holistic environmental assessment, and that other methodologies can be used. While the PEF works well for manufactured products, it is ill-suited to assess the environmental impact of agri-food products. For this reason, we welcome the concept of a “consultation forum” introduced by the European Parliament as it would enable relevant stakeholders to provide opinions on whether certain rules and methods are suitable for substantiating environmental claims in specific sectors”.
Ends.
Contact details
Eva Berckmans, Communications Manager
+32 2 416 27 62, [email protected]
or visit www.organicseurope.bio
Background information
European Union documents:
- European Commission’s Proposal for a Directive on substantiation and communication of explicit environmental claims (Green Claims Directive)
- The European Parliament’s files will be made available on the Parliament’s latest document page
European organic movement’s official position:
- IFOAM Organics Europe’s position paper on sustainability labelling
- The technical briefing highlighting the limitations of the PEF’s methodology
- Our work on food policies (scroll down and expand ‘Food labelling: Sustainability and nutritional labelling’)
Civil society’s concerns:
- Our January 2024 press conference explaining why the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) is a value choice instead of natural science-based
- An open letter by civil society, farmers, of retailers and processors criticising the PEF methodology applied to food products (March 2022) and a joint open letter on concerns over PEF methodology for textiles (November 2022)
- Rapport du CESIAe sur l’affichage environnemental (en français) (November 2023)
