Green Claims and “Old Stock”: The CPC Network’s Common Understanding on Enforcing the Green Transition Directive

The practical and regulatory problem

On 27 September 2026, Directive (EU) 2024/825 on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (the “ECGT”) becomes applicable across the European Union. The ECGT does not stand alone: it amends the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD, 2005/29/EC), introducing more specific prohibitions on environmental claims, sustainability labels and related practices, and extending the UCPD’s “blacklist” of practices banned in all circumstances.

In Italy, the Directive has already been transposed. Legislative Decree No. 30 of 20 February 2026 amended several provisions of the Consumer Code (Legislative Decree No. 206/2005), codifying the new rules on environmental claims and sustainability labels – and expressly qualifying greenwashing as an unfair commercial practice – while deferring their application to the same EU date of 27 September 2026. Enforcement falls to the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), which is competent for the application of the existing sanctioning framework for unfair commercial practices to the new provisions. Fines can be imposed of up to 10.000.000 euros for each autonomous infringement.

A crucial feature of the regime is its limited object. The ECGT, like the UCPD, does not regulate whether a product may be placed on the market; it governs how that product is presented to consumers – through packaging, advertising, online interfaces and other commercial communications. Enforcement rests with national competent authorities, including ordinary courts.

This is where the “old stock” problem arises, which undertakings have been vocal about, on account that many products and packages already sitting in warehouses, in transit, or on retailers’ shelves bear environmental claims or sustainability labels that were designed, ordered, manufactured or distributed before the application date of 27 September 2026. Reprinting packaging, recalling goods or rewriting claims overnight is, for many traders, neither feasible nor proportionate.

Recognising these genuine transitional difficulties, the Consumer Protection Cooperation (CPC) Network published, on 30 June 2026, a Common Understanding on old stock situations, annexed  to this article.

The document’s status should be clear from the outset. It is not a formal position of the CPC Network, nor a binding interpretation of the Directive. It is a non-exhaustive set of pragmatic principles, developed through consultations among CPC authorities between January and June 2026, intended to steer enforcement toward a coherent, EU-wide approach. National authorities are only “expected to consider” it when exercising their powers.

The modus operandi suggested to enforcement authorities

The Common Understanding sets out six principles that, read together, describe a clear enforcement posture.

First, old stock is not an exemption. Because the UCPD already applied to environmental claims and sustainability labels, traders cannot treat the new rules as a clean slate. They must move toward compliance without delay and in good faith, with 27 September 2026 as the firm reference point.

Second, enforcement may be phased where genuine and specific transitional difficulties exist. Authorities may sequence their scrutiny – prioritising, for example, claims already addressed under the UCPD, online claims(easier to correct than printed packaging), the practices most harmful to consumers, non-packaging marketing materials, and products with short shelf-life or fast rotation. In calibrating their response, authorities may weigh the trader’s role, size, resources, economic capacity and concrete good-faith efforts.

Third, practical constraints count. Packaging cycles, stock volumes, pre-existing production or purchase orders, supply-chain dependencies, the long shelf-life of certain goods, and the technical feasibility and proportionality of corrective measures may all be taken into account, case by case.

Fourth, reasonable and proportionate efforts are expected and should be documented. The document lists concrete measures: removing or correcting online claims, updating advertising, adapting future packaging and new orders, applying stickers or relabelling where feasible, displaying corrective information at the point of sale, coordinating with suppliers, and keeping records of the steps taken and their timing.

Fifth, disproportionate measures are to be avoided. Authorities may refrain from requiring the destruction or recall of products to address transitional claim issues, and may treat as unreasonable any measure that would generate disproportionate costs or unnecessary environmental harm – a sensible alignment with the Directive’s own green purpose.

Sixth, the overall stance is compliance-oriented before sanction-oriented. Especially in the early phase, authorities may favour awareness-raising, guidance, requests for information and requests for corrective action with reasonable timelines, reserving sanctions for the gravest cases.

Not a novelty: a familiar playbook, and the AGCM’s “moral suasion” established practice

For Italian practitioners, none of this is surprising. The phased, compliance-first approach the CPC describes is essentially what national authorities – and the AGCM in particular – have long applied in the early life of new rules. The AGCM’s well-established practice of moral suasion — inviting a trader to align its conduct spontaneously without opening, or before escalating, a formal sanctioning proceeding — is precisely the instrument the Common Understanding now generalises at EU level. The logic is consistent: where infringements are neither serious nor manifest, the priority is to achieve real compliance, not to punish the inevitable friction of a regulatory transition. Sanctions remain firmly available for the egregious or evident cases, but they are the exception rather than the opening move.

Seen in this light, the Common Understanding does not invent a new enforcement philosophy so much as it confirms, and coordinates across Member States, an approach that experienced authorities already treat as good practice.

Practical steps for businesses holding old stock

Companies that may be holding non-compliant old stock should not read the Common Understanding as a licence to wait. To minimise sanction risk, they should now:

1. Map exposure. Inventory every product, package, label and campaign carrying environmental claims or sustainability labels, distinguishing online assets from printed packaging and noting volumes and shelf-life.
2. Triage by risk. Prioritise the claims most likely to mislead and those already flagged under the UCPD and address online claims first.
3. Fix what is feasible now. Remove or correct digital claims, update advertising and promotional materials, and revise all future packaging and new purchase orders so the problem stops growing.
4. Deploy proportionate corrections for physical stock in particular where volumes of old stock are high. Use stickers, overlabelling or point-of-sale notices where a claim cannot be reprinted, rather than destroying goods.
5. Engage the supply chain. Coordinate with suppliers, distributors and retailers, and document who is responsible for each corrective step.
6. Build the evidence file to demonstrate compliance efforts. Keep dated records of decisions, internal compliance policies, substantiation work and timelines — this is precisely the documentation authorities expect to see.
7. Set a credible deadline. Define a realistic compliance roadmap, justified by objective constraints, and be ready to explain it on request.

A trader who can show a coherent, good-faith plan – and is already executing it – places itself squarely within the approach the CPC Network endorses, and well outside the category of cases that attract sanctions.

Read the pdf “Common Understanding on old stock situations“