Empowering Consumers Directive: Guide to EU 2024/825

The EU's Empowering Consumers Directive acknowledges the importance of empowering consumers to achieve the green transition. 

Currently, consumers face challenges in finding reliable information about product durability, repairability, and warranties, making sustainable purchases difficult and complex. While existing EU Directives like the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) and Consumer Rights Directive (CRD) already address consumer protection, they fall short in preventing greenwashing and providing clear guidelines for warranties that guarantee product durability. 

This Directive aims to provide consumers with clear and trustworthy information about the environmental, social, and circular impacts of products and services. When consumers have trust in the information they’re given, they’ll be able to more easily compare products, which leads to more sustainable consumption. 

This includes setting EU-wide rules to provide consumers with more information about the durability and repairability of products before they buy. It also aims to protect consumers from unfair business practices that discourage sustainable purchases, such as:

• Greenwashing: Making false or misleading claims about a product's environmental benefits.
• Planned obsolescence: Designing products to fail or become outdated quickly.
• Misleading labels and claims: Using unreliable or unclear sustainability labels and claims.

The requirements of the Empowering Consumers Directive in short:

• Durability Guarantees: Providing information about the warranty of products.
• Software Updates: Informing consumers about the availability of free software updates for goods with digital elements, content, or services.
• Product Reparability: Providing information on product reparability, such as a reparability score or other relevant repair information.
• Accurate Claims: Preventing traders from misleading consumers about environmental, social, durability, or reparability impacts.
• Future Performance Claims: Environmental claims about future impact can only be made if there are clear commitments on how to achieve this.‍
• Exaggerated Claims: Traders are not allowed to advertise benefits of their product or service if this benefit is already common practice in the relevant market. For example, a legal requirement to inform consumers about harmful chemicals present in a product would not be considered a significant benefit that justifies advertising.

What does the Directive cover?

This Directive focuses on commercial practices between businesses and consumers that directly involve the promotion, sale, or supply of products or services, as well as the information provided to consumers about the product or service.

The requirements will apply to all EU/ EEA traders, and non-EU companies selling products to EU/EEA consumers.

Depending on the requirement, the Directive's scope also extends beyond the producing and manufacturing industry. While some rules apply to physical goods, others, like environmental claims, apply to any commercial communication.

Requirements of the Empowering Consumers Directive

Since this is a Directive, each EU member country must implement the Directive’s requirements into their own national laws. It’s important to check the specific compliance rules for each country to ensure you’re following the correct regulations — including understanding the difference between a directive and regulation.

1. Amendments to the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD)

The Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (UCPD) of 2005 was designed to support consumers when buying goods and services for businesses. It contains a list of misleading business practices that are prohibited. The Empowering Consumers Directive expands upon this list by including environmental, social, and circularity aspects as key product features that must not mislead consumers that includes:

• Unauthorized sustainability labels
  ‍Sustainability labels are only allowed if they are based on a certification scheme or have been established by public authorities. They should be transparent and credible, and verified by an independent authorized third party.
  
• Generic environmental claims without proof
  ‍Generic claims such as "green," "carbon-friendly," or "nature positive" are prohibited unless the product has proven excellent environmental performance.
  
• Exaggerating claims
  ‍Suggesting an environmental benefit applies to the entire product when it only relates to a specific part. For example, claiming a refrigerator is "energy efficient" because of its LED lighting.
  
• Carbon benefits through offsetting
  ‍Claiming, based on the offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions, that a product has a neutral, reduced, or positive impact on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
  
• Marketing legal requirements
  ‍Promoting legal requirements as a unique feature. For example, advertising a warranty of 2 years, which is mandatory by law anyway.
  
• Negative impacts of software updates
  ‍Withholding information about the negative impact of software updates on digital products, content, or services. For example, a software update might cause a previously compatible device to no longer work properly.
  
• Non-essential software updates
  ‍Presenting a functionality update as necessary when it only enhances features.
  
• Limiting Durability
  ‍Promoting products that have built-in features that limit durability. For example, a phone with a planned battery life span of 2 years to incentivize the purchase of a new phone.
  
• False Durability claims
  ‍Claiming that a product has a specific lifespan under normal use when this is not true.
  
• False repairability claim
  ‍Claiming a product is repairable when it is not.
  
• Premature replacement
  ‍Encouraging consumers to replace or refill essential parts of products in order to keep the product functioning when it is not necessary yet. For example, activating people to replace printer ink cartridges before they are actually empty in order to drive additional sales of cartridges.
  
• Effect of non-original parts
  ‍Not communicating that a product might not work as well when using non-original parts, or falsely claiming that using non-original parts will harm the product when it won't.

The Empowering Consumers Directive also requires environmental claims about future performance, such as "Our company aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030’’ to:

• Have clear, objective, publicly available, and verifiable commitments.
• Be supported by an implementation plan with measurable and time-bound targets.
• Be regularly verified by an independent third-party.

When a trader compares the environmental or social characteristics of their product/service to another product/service, they must disclose on:

• Method: Clearly explain the comparison method.
• Products: Identify the products and suppliers.‍
• Updates: Disclose how comparison information is maintained and updated.

2. Amendments to the Consumer Rights Directive

The EU Consumer Rights Directive (CRD) from 2011 gave consumers the same strong rights across the EU. By harmonizing national regulations, the CRD ensured that consumers throughout the EU now all have the same rights, such as the right to be informed about products before purchase and the right to cancel online orders, wherever they shop in the EU. 

The Empowering Consumers Directive adds the following requirements: 

Honest warranties: Warranties given about the product's lifespan should be based on the entire product, not a component.

Information before point of sale: Consumers should be provided with information before making a purchase. This information includes:

• Access to repairability and durability: Consumers should have access to repairability and durability information at the point of sale.
• After-sales support: After-sales services should be clearly communicated.
• Repairability score: A repairability score, indicating how easy it is to repair a product, should be provided when available. If no EU repairability score exists, traders must provide repair-related information as provided by the producer.
• Software updates: Consumers must be informed about the minimum period for software updates for digital goods and services. Traders are only required to provide this information if the producer has shared it.
• Sustainable delivery options: When applicable, traders should inform consumers about available environmentally friendly delivery options.
• Harmonized label for product warranties, An standardized EU label will be developed to make warranties on product durability easy to understand and compare for consumers. This label should show if a product comes with more than 2 years of guarantee, with no extra costs.

Current status & timeline of the Empowering Consumers Directive

The Directive entered into force on March 26, 2024. As it is a Directive, national governments of the EU member states will need to incorporate its requirements into their national laws. They have time to do so until March 27 of 2026. Half a year later, by September 27, 2024, the requirements will enter into force.

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