“Eco”, “Green”, “Sustainable”: The Words to Stop Using in Your Social Media Posts
Look at the last month of posts from your business. There is a good chance one of them says something like “our eco-friendly packaging”, “a greener way to clean your office” or “climate neutral delivery”. Nobody thought twice about it. It was true enough, customers like it, and every competitor says the same.
Since 27 September 2026 those phrases are a problem. New EU rules on green claims apply to everything a business says to consumers to sell its products, and that includes social media posts, not only labels and adverts. If you run a small business in Belgium or the Netherlands and you ever mention the environment in a caption, this is what changed and how to keep saying something useful.
What the new rules ban
The rules come from an EU directive with a long name, the Directive on Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (Directive 2024/825). It adds three things to the list of commercial practices that are always considered unfair towards consumers:
- Generic environmental claims. Words like “environmentally friendly”, “eco-friendly”, “green”, “ecological” or “climate friendly” are banned unless you can show recognised excellent environmental performance. In practice that means something like the EU Ecolabel or an equivalent official scheme, not your own judgement.
- Claims of neutral, reduced or positive climate impact based on offsetting. If your delivery is “climate neutral” because you pay for trees to be planted somewhere, you can no longer say so.
- Home-made sustainability labels. A little green leaf logo with “Our Green Promise” next to it is only allowed if it is based on a certification scheme or set by a public authority.
The directive also tightens claims about the future. “Net zero by 2030” now needs a detailed, realistic plan with measurable targets and regular checks by an independent expert behind it. For most small businesses that means: do not make the promise in a post.
Yes, this includes your Instagram captions
It is tempting to think these rules are for supermarket packaging and national TV adverts. They are not. They cover commercial practices towards consumers, which is any communication meant to sell. Law firm Latham & Watkins notes specifically that reusing lines from a sustainability report in social media content brings them within scope. A caption, a Reel voice-over, a story sticker and the bio on your profile are all communication from your business to potential customers.
Pictures count too. A generic claim can be made with images and colours alongside the words, so a post that combines “better for the planet” with a field of flowers and a green filter is not safer than the words on their own.
In the Netherlands the ACM, the consumer authority, has said it will supervise the new rules and has asked companies to review their current sustainability claims critically. It has had its own guidance on sustainability claims since 2021. In Belgium, consumer rules are enforced by the FPS Economy.
ACM: from 27 September 2026, stricter requirements for sustainability claims (Dutch)
What you can still say
The rules do not ban talking about the environment. They ban being vague about it. The fix is almost always the same: replace the adjective with the fact behind it, stated in the same post.
- Instead of “eco-friendly packaging”: “Our boxes are 100% recycled cardboard, and you can put them straight in the paper bin.”
- Instead of “a greener way to clean”: say which products you switched to and what certification they carry, if they carry one. If they do not, describe what changed (“we now use refill containers, so we throw away about one plastic bottle a week instead of twenty”) only if you have actually counted.
- Instead of “climate neutral delivery”: “We deliver in Antwerp by electric van.” Say what you do, not what it balances out to.
- Instead of a home-made green badge: mention the official label your product actually carries, by name, or nothing.
A claim is specific when a customer could check it. “Recycled cardboard” can be checked. “Kinder to the planet” cannot. When you are unsure, ask yourself what evidence you would show if a customer or the consumer authority asked for it tomorrow. If the answer is nothing, leave the claim out.
A ten-minute check for this week
- Search your own Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts, plus your website, for: eco, green, groen, duurzaam, durable, sustainable, climate, klimaat, natural, planet.
- For each hit, write down the fact behind it. If there is a fact, rewrite the post around the fact. If there is not, edit or archive the post if it is still pinned, in your highlights or used in an advert.
- Check your bio lines and pinned posts first. They are seen far more often than a post from last spring.
- Look at any logo or badge you use that nobody outside your business awarded. Stop using it.
- Tell whoever writes your posts, whether that is a colleague, a freelancer or an agency, that vague green adjectives are off the list from now on.
The last point is where outsourcing helps or hurts. A team that writes your captions needs to know the rule, and you still need to see the posts before they go out. At Swiftly Marketing nothing is published until the client has approved it in a shared calendar, which is also the moment to catch a claim nobody can prove.
Why this is not only bad news
When every business nearby calls itself green, the word stops meaning anything to customers anyway. The new rules push everyone towards the kind of post that actually works on social media: specific, concrete and about something you did. “We switched to recycled boxes in March, here is the supplier” is a better post than “we care about the planet” ever was. If you want help planning a month of posts built around facts like that, our guide to a 30-day marketing calendar is a good place to start.
How to build a 30-day marketing calendar that actually works
Sources
EUR-Lex: Directive (EU) 2024/825 on empowering consumers for the green transition
If your posts need a review before the next campaign, or you would rather someone else wrote them with the rules in mind, book a free intro call. It takes fifteen minutes, and the €1 a day offer lets you try us on one platform first.
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