The Commission's ECGT Q&A: No Grace Period, and a Green Leaf Can Be a Sustainability Label

The Commission's Directorate-General for Justice and Consumers has published a Questions & Answers document on Directive (EU) 2024/825, the Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive. It is dated September 2026, the file itself was made on 21 September, it is twenty pages, it is not binding, and it answers twenty questions that industry had been asking.

Five of those answers are more consequential than the directive text on its own suggests, and the timing is tight: the directive applies from 27 September 2026, days after the document appeared.

This is not a Digital Product Passport rule. ECGT amends the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive, and it regulates how a product is presented, not what the product is. But it lands on the same surfaces a passport lands on — labels, packaging, product pages — and one of its answers is about QR codes.

1. There is no transition period, and old stock is not exempt

This is the answer most likely to cost somebody money.

The ECGT Directive shall apply from 27 September 2026. From that date, traders will need to ensure that their environmental claims and sustainability labels in a business-to-consumer context comply with the new provisions, including for existing products or 'old stock' situations, i.e. products or packaging already manufactured, ordered, distributed or placed on retailers' shelves before the application date.

And, on certification schemes specifically:

Any sustainability label on the market as of 27 September 2026 must comply with these provisions. Existing schemes that do not meet the requirements [...] must be adapted accordingly, otherwise the associated labels must be removed from commercial communications. The ECGT Directive does not provide for a transition period beyond this date.

The Commission does offer a practical route for goods already printed:

These may include covering or correcting claims by stickers or adding supplementary information at the point of sale in proximity of the old stock products concerned, for example, by clearly identifying the affected products in the corresponding aisle of retailer's premises.

Stickers over printed packaging, or a sign in the aisle. That is the remedy on offer, and it tells you how seriously to take the date. Enforcement sits with national authorities and courts, and the Q&A notes they may weigh whether a trader made "reasonable and proportionate efforts to comply" — which is mitigation, not exemption.

2. A certification scheme needs two separate legal entities

Under Annex I point 2a of the UCPD as amended, displaying a sustainability label that is not based on a certification scheme, and not established by a public authority, is prohibited. Annex I is the blacklist: prohibited in all circumstances, with no case-by-case assessment of consumer harm.

So the definition of "certification scheme" decides which marks survive. The Q&A lists the criteria:

Then comes the part that is not in the directive text:

Even if there were certain international standards that might allow for the scheme owner and third party to be the same, compliance with the provisions of the ECGT Directive can only be achieved if the scheme owner and the third party are legally separated, i.e. there are two different legal entities.

A brand may own a scheme — the Q&A is explicit that scheme owner and trader can be the same entity, provided the scheme is genuinely open. What it may not do is own the scheme and the body that audits against it. Any programme where the standard-setter and the auditor sit inside one legal person fails, regardless of what an international standard would permit.

3. A government eco-label from outside the EU does not count

The directive's carve-out for labels "established by public authorities" reads, on its face, as jurisdiction-neutral. The Commission reads it narrowly:

Consequently, the display of sustainability labels established by public authorities of non-EU Member States will be prohibited under Annex I point 2a to the UCPD [...] unless these labels are based on a certification scheme.

The reasoning given is that the directive is addressed to Member States, that its examples focus on EU public authorities, and that where the legislature wanted to distinguish international from national it did so explicitly elsewhere — and did not here.

The practical effect: a national eco-label from a third country carries no protection of its own. It has to qualify as a certification scheme on the seven criteria above, or come off the packaging.

4. A green leaf can be a sustainability label

The definition in Article 2(1)(q) covers "any voluntary trust mark, quality mark or equivalent". The Q&A applies that to artwork:

Overall, traders should exercise caution when using icons, symbols, images, or artwork that could be perceived as (implicit) environmental claims or trust marks. For example, a green leaf or water drop, when combined with logos or positioned next to statements about sustainability or natural ingredients, may be seen by the average consumer as a voluntary trust mark or quality mark.

The test is consumer perception, assessed against the average consumer, in the overall context of the communication. A leaf on its own is not a label. A leaf in a roundel, next to the word "conscious", beside a logo, may well be — and if it is, it needs a certification scheme behind it like any other mark.

This one matters for design review, not legal review. It is the packaging studio's decision that creates the exposure.

5. A QR code is an accepted way to give access to the evidence

The directive requires that claims about future environmental performance rest on publicly available commitments, a detailed implementation plan, and verification by an independent third-party expert whose regular findings are made available to consumers. It does not say where.

[...] several options are possible as long as consumers can easily access the information, e.g. via a QR code on product packaging or marketing materials that guides consumers to the findings on the trader's website.

And for the implementation plan itself:

It is sufficient if the claim refers consumers to where the information can be found, e.g. through a QR code guiding to the implementation plan on the trader's website.

This is the point where ECGT and the passport regime meet. The Commission is not requiring a passport here, and nothing in ECGT does. But it has stated plainly that a code on the pack, resolving to a page the trader controls, satisfies the accessibility requirement — which is the same mechanism ESPR Article 9 builds on, and the same one a GS1 Digital Link address already provides.

If you are printing a data carrier for passport reasons, the substantiation behind your green claims can resolve from the same place.

What this means for a brand with certificates on its products

The two regimes ask different questions about the same certificate.

A certificate can be entirely genuine and still fail ECGT, because ECGT is not asking about the certificate. It is asking about the institution that issued it.

So the work splits in two:

1. Inventory every mark that reaches a consumer — packaging, hangtags, sewn-in labels, product pages, passport pages, marketing. Including the artwork that is not a mark but reads as one.
2. For each, name the scheme and check it against the seven criteria, with particular attention to whether the body that audits is a different legal person from the body that wrote the rules.
3. For anything already printed, decide now between a sticker, a point-of-sale notice, and withdrawal. That decision is easier to make before an authority makes it.

DPP Agent verifies that a certificate on a passport is genuine and current — against the issuer's register where one is reachable, and by a human reading the public register where it is not, as with Textile Exchange. That answers the first question in the table above. It does not answer the second, and no passport system can: whether a scheme qualifies under Article 2(r) is a question about the scheme's governance, not about your product's data.

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Sources

Primary sources used in this article:

• European Commission, DG Justice and Consumers — Questions & Answers on Directive (EU) 2024/825, Brussels, September 2026 — commission.europa.eu
• Directive (EU) 2024/825 (ECGT Directive), amending Directives 2005/29/EC and 2011/83/EU — EUR-Lex full text
• Directive 2005/29/EC (UCPD), Article 2(q) and (r), Article 6, Article 7(7), Annex I points 2a, 4c and 10a — EUR-Lex
• Directive 2011/83/EU (CRD), Articles 5(1) and 6(1) as amended — EUR-Lex
• Commission Notice 2021/C 526/01 — UCPD Guidance Notice, section 4.1.1.3 on implicit claims — EUR-Lex
• Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 (ESPR) — EUR-Lex

The Q&A states its own status plainly: the views in it are "the preliminary views of the European Commission (EC) services and may not under any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the EC". Only the Court of Justice can interpret EU law authoritatively, and enforcement sits with national authorities and courts.