L’affichage environnemental

• The Energy Transition for Green Growth Act established a transparency requirement to enable businesses to communicate clear and reliable information to consumers about the environmental impacts of the products and services offered to them. • Environmental labeling is the tool that allows companies to meet this transparency requirement. • The Circular Economy Act introduces a voluntary environmental labeling scheme, or environmental and social labeling scheme.

• Environmental labeling of a product or service consists of communicating to consumers, on any appropriate medium (the product itself, on shelving, on a website, etc.), quantified information about its main environmental impacts, calculated over its entire life cycle. • It is a new scheme, public and governed by common rules, designed to provide consumers with relevant, objective and comparable information to inform their purchasing decisions. It also addresses producers and distributors to encourage and recognize their eco-design efforts.

• Article 90 of the Energy Transition for Green Growth Act states that "in order to guarantee the quality of environmental information made available to the consumer, producers making voluntary communications or environmental claims concerning their products must simultaneously make available the main environmental characteristics of these products." • For a company, communicating about a particular environmental aspect of a product (example: recycled content) remains possible, but this communication can no longer be limited to this single environmental aspect. In other words, a multi-criteria approach is required and the company must simultaneously describe the main environmental characteristics of the product in question. • Article 90 therefore aims to regulate environmental claims and combat greenwashing (unfounded, biased or partial claims intended to make a product appear more environmentally friendly than it actually is). • The Circular Economy Act introduces a voluntary environmental labeling scheme, or environmental and social labeling scheme. The categories of goods and services concerned, the methodology to be used and the labeling methods will be specified by decree, following an 18-month pilot period from the enactment of the law. • This labeling can be implemented through marking, labeling or any other appropriate method.