EU Green Claims Directive: Shopify Merchant Guide

If your Shopify store sells to customers in Germany, France, the Netherlands, or anywhere else in the EU, you have until September 27, 2026 to make sure your sustainability claims can stand up to scrutiny. That deadline is closer than it sounds.

The regulation at the center of this is the EU’s ECGT directive, and it does not only apply to EU businesses. It applies to any trader making environmental claims to EU consumers, wherever that business happens to be based. For Shopify merchants who plant trees per order, display sustainability badges, or describe their brand as “eco-friendly,” this matters a lot.

Here is what the regulation says, who it covers, and how to check whether your claims qualify.

What Is the ECGT Directive?

ECGT stands for Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition. The full citation is Directive (EU) 2024/825. It was adopted in March 2024, entered into force in March 2024, and becomes enforceable across all EU member states on September 27, 2026 .

The directive amends two existing pieces of EU consumer law: the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and the Consumer Rights Directive. The core principle is simple: if you cannot back up an environmental claim with verifiable evidence, you cannot make it.

Note that this is often confused with the separate EU Green Claims Directive, which was a more detailed proposal requiring pre-verification of all explicit environmental claims. The Commission announced in June 2025 that it intended to withdraw the Green Claims Directive proposal. The ECGT is unaffected by that withdrawal. The ECGT is already law, and it applies from September 2026.

What the ECGT Actually Bans

The directive adds a set of commercial practices that are automatically considered unfair, without requiring a case-by-case investigation. These are the four categories most relevant to e-commerce merchants.

Generic environmental claims

The directive prohibits any broad environmental claim where the specific evidence is not provided in clear and prominent terms on the same medium. The European Commission has explicitly listed terms that fall into this category: “eco-friendly,” “green,” “carbon friendly,” “eco,” “sustainable,” and “biodegradable.”

Using any of these on your product pages, homepage, or marketing materials aimed at EU consumers is prohibited from September 2026, unless either (a) the product holds an official EU certification like the EU Ecolabel, or (b) you immediately specify what the claim means with verifiable evidence.

The practical path for most merchants is option (b). A claim like “sustainable packaging” is prohibited. A claim like “packaging made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic, certified by” a named scheme is not. Specific, substantiated claims remain fully legal.

Product-level carbon neutral claims

This is the provision with the sharpest teeth for brands using carbon offsetting as a marketing tool. The directive explicitly prohibits product-level claims such as “carbon neutral,” “climate neutral,” “CO2 neutral certified,” and “climate net zero” unless a product’s actual lifecycle impact is genuinely neutral without relying on offsets outside the product’s own value chain.

In practice: a merchant cannot label a product as carbon neutral because they purchased carbon credits to cover the emissions. The product’s entire lifecycle must be genuinely neutral to justify the claim.

Unverified sustainability labels

Any sustainability badge or mark on a product must be backed by a certification scheme that is transparent, open to all businesses, developed with independent expert input, and monitored by a third party legally separate from the scheme owner. Self-awarded green labels, private badges with no accreditation behind them, and certifications issued by organizations with a financial interest in the outcome are prohibited.

Overstating the scope of a claim

An environmental claim cannot imply broader impact than the evidence supports. A product cannot be marketed as “made with recycled materials” if only the packaging meets that description. A business cannot present itself as solar-powered if only one of its facilities runs on renewable energy.

Who Does ECGT Apply To?

The directive applies to any trader engaging in commercial practices directed at EU consumers, regardless of where that business is headquartered. This includes UK businesses shipping to EU customers, US and Australian merchants selling to European markets, and global Shopify stores with EU traffic.

If your Shopify store ships to any EU country and your product pages, email campaigns, or homepage copy use vague sustainability language, you need to review it before September 2026.

What “Plant a Tree Per Order” Claims Look Like Under ECGT

This is where the regulation gets very specific, and where merchants using GoodAPI’s tree-planting integration have a clear advantage.

The ECGT does not prohibit environmental marketing. It prohibits environmental marketing that cannot be substantiated. That distinction matters a great deal for tree-planting claims.

Claims that are not compliant

These formulations will not hold up under ECGT because they are vague, generic, or unverifiable:

• “We’re an eco-friendly brand”
• “We offset our carbon footprint by planting trees”
• “Every purchase helps the environment”
• “We plant trees to be carbon neutral”
• “Sustainable shopping” (without specification)

A claim that trees are planted but provides no mechanism for verification, no third-party oversight, and no specific quantity per transaction is not specific enough to meet the directive’s requirements.

Claims that are compliant

A claim like “1 tree planted per order, verified by Veritree” is specific, traceable, and supported by an independent third-party verification scheme. It meets the ECGT standard because:

1. The quantity is precise: one tree per order, not a vague environmental contribution.
2. The verification is independent: Veritree is an external organization with no financial stake in the outcome that GoodAPI uses to verify planting.
3. The planting is traceable: Veritree uses GPS tracking to geolocate each tree and monitors its survival through its critical first years of growth.
4. The claim is not a carbon neutral claim: it describes a specific action, not a lifecycle outcome.

GoodAPI charges $0.43/tree with no monthly fee, and every tree planted through the app is tracked through Veritree’s verification platform. Merchants get a live impact counter showing the exact number of trees planted. That counter is the evidence trail that makes the claim substantiatable.

The claim on your store does not need to mention the price. It just needs to be specific: what was planted, where, and how it was verified. GoodAPI’s merchant dashboard gives you everything you need to back that up.

Your ECGT Compliance Checklist

Here is a practical sequence for reviewing your Shopify store before the September 2026 deadline.

The Broader Shift

The ECGT directive is part of a wider regulatory trend. The UK’s CMA Green Claims Code and the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 set comparable expectations for UK-facing marketing. Australia, Canada, and the United States are all tightening rules around environmental marketing claims along similar lines.

The merchants who will navigate this well are the ones whose sustainability claims are already specific, already verifiable, and already backed by evidence. “1 tree planted per order, verified by an independent organization, GPS-tracked for five years” is the kind of claim that holds up. It does not need lawyers. It needs a consistent practice and a real paper trail.

GoodAPI was built to provide exactly that. The app has 200+ five-star reviews and a 5.0★ rating on the Shopify App Store, with merchants generating real impact data on every order at $0.43 per tree. If you are reviewing your sustainability claims for ECGT compliance and looking for a specific, verifiable action to anchor them to, that is a good place to start.

If you are ready to make your tree-planting claim ECGT-ready, you can install GoodAPI from the Shopify App Store.