Sustainability and advertising exaggeration do not go together (any longer)

Last week, KLM was reprimanded by the court in what Fossil Free called ‘our greenwashing case against KLM’. KLM made misleading sustainability claims. And that did not go unnoticed in the (legal) world. That deception was, in this case, quite obvious. Suggesting that flying is sustainable, or that a ‘compensation’ product takes part of the climate impact of flying away, is not allowed. After all, the aviation sector remains a huge polluter. That is why Lufthansa (“Connecting the world. Protecting its future”) and Etihad (“Environmental Advocacy”) have recently been fined in the UK.

Fossil-free formulated it very aptly in the KLM case: the only sustainable thing that KLM can do is to fly fewer planes. But instead, in its advertising, KLM actually promotes the growth of aviation while also suggesting that it is possible to fly “sustainable” or “responsible” with KLM. And those two things don’t go together.

The KLM ruling and other recent examples make one thing clear: combating greenwashing is high on the agenda. Not only on the agenda of environmental groups, judges and regulators, but also on that of lawmakers. In addition to the general legislation protecting against unfair commercial practices, the Code for Sustainable Advertising and the updated Sustainability Claims Guideline have been in force in the Netherlands since 2023.

Furthermore, new regulations are also expected at the European level. The Green Claims Directive and the Directive to strengthen the position of consumers for the green transition are coming up, which aim, among other things, to better protect against unfair sustainability practices.

Advertising messages about sustainability are therefore under the microscope. And that means that advertisers must be more concrete and transparent than ever when using sustainability claims. Advertisers can be challenged by environmental groups, the regulator the Autoriteit Consument en Markt (which can impose fines), but also by competitors and consumers. Where courts generally still assume that the public is accustomed to a certain level of advertising exaggeration, the advertiser can no longer get away with “green” branding, full of references to nature, sustainability and happy animals. This is also demonstrated by the recent action by the ACM against Zalando, which was fined for all kinds of visual claims on its website in the form of leaves, trees and sustainability flags.

The bar is high. Sustainability claims must be accurate, specific, complete, relevant, and up-to-date, verifiable, and easily explainable. Sustainable ambitions must be realistic and measurable, without vagueness and incompleteness, and here again, the evidence for the ambitions must be easily accessible. It sounds like a whole list, but in reality it’s not that complicated: communicate concretely and only what you can actually deliver, and explain why that’s the case. Within those frameworks, of course, communicating about sustainability remains something that can only be applauded. Consumers are being helped to make informed sustainability choices, in one of the most complex challenges of our time. And that’s what we must continue to encourage.