Greenwashing is briefly defined as ‘an untrue or unverifiable statement that a good or service has a positive impact on the environment, or at least no negative impact, or is less harmful to the environment compared to competing goods or services’. There are two important regulations at EU level to prevent green washing: Directive on Empowering Consumers in Green Transformation ((EU) 2024/825) and Draft Green Claims Directive. In Turkish Law, there are currently two main regulations on this issue. The first one is the provisions on unfair competition regulated under Articles 5463 of the TCC, and the other one is the Regulation on Commercial Advertisements and Unfair Commercial Practices and the Guideline on Advertisements Containing Environmental Declarations issued by Commission of Advertising based on this Regulation.

The Empowering Directive makes certain amendments for the prevention of green washing within the scope of commercial practices regulated in Articles 6 and 7 of the Unfair Practices Directive, which are considered deceptive and therefore prohibited, and misleading practices regulated in Annex I, which are considered unfair and prohibited in all circumstances. According to Article 6(1) of the Unfair Practices Directive, a commercial practice shall be deemed to be an unfair commercial practice in the nature of deceptive behavior if it contains false information and is therefore untrue, or if, even if it contains accurate information, it deceives or is likely to deceive the average consumer in certain respects in any way, including the manner of presentation, and causes or is likely to cause the consumer to take a decision on a transaction which the consumer would not actually take. In the provision, the issues where the consumer may be deceived are listed in six subparagraphs. Here, with the amendment made in Art. 6/f. 1/b, ‘environmental and social features’ and ‘circularity features such as durability, repairability and recyclability’ have been added to the features of the product that should not be misleading. Two new cases have been added to the practices set out in Art. 6(2) of the Unfair Practices Directive, where it is determined whether the commercial practice is deceptive or not by taking into account all the existing circumstances on a caseby case basis. The first one (Art. 6(2)(d)) is environmental representations (relating to a product, product category, brand or operator) concerning future environmental performance. The other is ‘advertising of benefits to consumers that are not derived from, and are unrelated to, any characteristic of the product or business’ (art. 6/f. 2/e).

One of the unfair commercial practices based on lack of consumer information is introduced by the Empowering Directive. In the newly added f. 7 to Art. 7 of the Unfair Practices Directive, where an operator provides a service which compares products and provides consumers with information on environmental or social characteristics or on circularity aspects such as the durability, repairability or recyclability of products or their suppliers, the method of comparison, information on the products concerned and their suppliers, as well as the measures taken to keep the information up to date, are recognized as essential information which must be provided to consumers.

With the Green Claim Directive, which aims to complement the Empowering Directive and to uniformize and concretize the standards to which environmental declarations are subject, green declarations of enterprises will in future have to be verified by independent auditors and substantiated on the basis of scientific evidence. In the Draft Directive, the requirements for open environmental declarations relate to their clarity, accuracy, relevance and comparability, and labelling systems for products will only be applicable if they are verified in the manner provided for in the EU Directive.

In Turkish Law, the first regulation on the prevention of green laundering is Article 62/f. 1 of the Law on the Protection of Consumers. Here, unfair commercial practices towards consumers are prohibited. In addition, the determination of which commercial practices have these characteristics is made according to the Regulation on Commercial Adver tising and Unfair Commercial Practices dated 2015. According to Article 29/f. 1 of this Regulation, ‘Commercial practices that contain false information or, even if the information provided is essentially correct, when all the circumstances of its presentation are evaluated, deceive or are likely to deceive the average consumer and thus cause or are likely to cause the consumer to become a party to a legal transaction to which the consumer would not be a party under normal circumstances shall be deemed deceptive’. In the provision, the acts related to certain matters are also counted as deceptive commercial practices (Art. 29/f. 2). The most important of these acts in terms of our subject matter are the acts that deceive the consumer in terms of ‘the effects of a good or service on the ….environment’ under Art. 29/f. 2/a. Since greenwashing is briefly defined as the misleading of consumers by an enterprise that it or its products and services are environmentally friendly, there is no doubt that green laundering practices will also fall within the scope of Art. 29/f. 2/a of the Regulation on Advertising and Practices.