Stop greenwash – how to verify your sustainability claims
EU directives on green claims and sustainability reporting aim to enable consumers to obtain accurate and trustworthy information regarding the sustainability of companies or products. However, the reporting requirements for businesses are considerable, introducing new tasks and processes. A recently concluded project, funded by Climate Leading Process Industry, has developed a method to simplify this work.
Raul Carlsson from RISE has lead the project.
“A verifiable sustainability claim should not only be accurate but also formulated in a way that allows for evaluation against objective and standardised criteria. For example, if you say you are ten per cent better than someone else, you must be able to demonstrate that,” says Raul Carlsson from RISE, who led the Verifiable Sustainability Claims project.
The project has conducted an in-depth analysis of EU requirements regarding sustainability claims throughout the value chain, with a particular focus on the European Commission's proposed Green Claims Directive and its interaction with related legislation such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS).
To provide practical guidance for B2B companies, RISE, together with industry partners Ineos, OhlaPlast, and Perstorp, has developed methods and tools, including checklists designed to assess the verifiability of various claims and statements about product sustainability based on the different directives.
“Companies often think they need a lot of different experts to report for various directives, but we believe that it is often the same information that needs to go in different directions. Companies have much to gain from managing this in a common system that can be understood by different professions within the company,” says Raul Carlsson.
To gain a general overview of the claims being made, the project partners reviewed the participating companies' websites – however, specific details linked to individual companies have been omitted from the report.
“We had very interesting discussions with many talented experts from the companies. Everyone wants to be green, but often the statements are vague and sweeping, making them difficult to verify. However, the aim is not to make communication easy, but rather to communicate comprehensible facts. Here, there is an internal challenge for companies to get, for example, the manufacturers, those who produce certificates, and the marketing departments to meet and have access to facts that everyone can understand.”
The project now hopes that more B2B companies will benefit from the study. By reading the final report and taking onboard the review of standards, tools, and checklists made available there, they will have come a long way, and if they wish to delve deeper into the work, they are welcome to contact the report authors Raul Carlsson or Tatiana Nevzorova for support.
Read more about the project and the final report
