The European Container Glass manufacturing industry supports the intention of the European Commission’s Green Claims proposal (1) to ensure that consumers and businesses have access to reliable, comparable, and verifiable information to make sustainable decisions and avoid the proliferation of misleading green claims.
 
We are pleased the European Commission proposes a legal framework to enable companies substantiate their green claims based on reliable assessment. The methods used for calculating sustainable impacts though still have large gaps and it is welcome that the proposal takes an open approach to prescribing methods that can be used to ensure credibility, reliability, transparency, robustness, and clarity of the claims being made.
 
Even the EU Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology (2), based on Life-Cycle-Assessment (LCA), has large gaps, which need to be addressed to improve its robustness and reliability. In particular, some environmental impacts of products – such as the circularity of packaging, its infinite recyclability, the avoidance of food waste, littering, biodiversity, toxicity, etc. – are not yet or sufficiently taken into account.
 
Until now, sustainable packaging assessments have focused mainly on environmental impacts such as CO2 emissions, but human health effects must not be understated, and should be equally measured.
 
Sustainability assessments are complicated, and this proposal goes a long way to help consumers know more about what they are buying based on verified claims.