Container glass industry welcomes green claims proposal

The European Container Glass manufacturing industry supports the intention of the European Commission’s Green Claims proposal, which ensures that companies’ sustainability claims are valid.

The European Container Glass Federation (FEVE) is pleased the European Commission proposes a legal framework to enable companies substantiate their green claims based on reliable assessment.

The intention of the proposal¹ is 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.

However, FEVE believes the methods used for calculating sustainable impacts still have large gaps.

It welcomes the proposal to take 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, based on Life-Cycle-Assessment (LCA), has large gaps that need to be addressed to improve its robustness and reliability.

In particular, FEVE thinks 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 considered.

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 FEVE believes this proposal goes a long way to help consumers know more about what they are buying based on verified claims.

References

1. Proposal for a Directive on substantiation and communication of explicit environmental claims (Green Claims Directive)