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The new rules for green claims in Austria apply from 27 September 2026, implementing an EU directive that changes the requirements for environmental claims in every member state on the same date. They arrive at a point when executive teams are getting smaller and regulatory workload is still growing.
In most companies above a certain size, the answer is more than ten. Every one of those approvals was introduced for a reason that was valid at the time, and the process was never designed as a whole. It accumulated.
In a company of twenty, thirty or fifty people, the answer to the same question is usually one person, and often it is the founder. The difficulty there is the opposite one. Nothing accumulated, because a sentence about a product never looked like something that needed approving.
For the past twenty years, operational and regulatory complexity increased steadily, and companies responded by increasing the number of executive positions. Management theory describes the limit behind that decision as span of control: one role can only supervise a certain amount of work before the supervision becomes only formal rather than substantial. Companies applied the principle consistently. When regulation increased, the legal function was expanded. When reputation became a measurable business risk, the communication function was expanded. Each decision was reasonable on its own, but the combined effect was never reviewed.
The scale of that expansion is documented. A Deloitte analysis of Fortune 500 leadership composition between 2018 and 2023, based on BoardEx, found that senior teams grew by an average of 23 percent over those five years, from 6.7 executives to 8.2. Growth concentrated in specific functions: roles covering environmental, social and governance topics grew by 230 percent, communications and public relations by 133 percent, and legal by 127 percent. The sample covers large American corporations, so the figures indicate a direction rather than a description of the Austrian market, which tends to follow with a delay of several years. Within that direction, one point is consistent. Legal and communication were the two fastest-growing functions after ESG, and both were added as separate positions that met only when a specific project required it.
The same analysis records the turn. Among legal executives in Fortune 500 senior teams, 67 percent now hold a dual title, meaning one person formally carries the legal function together with a second one such as compliance, governance or corporate affairs. Positions were added, and those positions then began absorbing further responsibilities, within the same five-year period.
Regulatory requirements have not followed the same curve. Nothing in the environment of 2026 is simpler than it was in 2018, and reporting obligations in particular have expanded considerably. The volume of judgment a company has to produce continues to rise while the number of senior people available to produce it has stopped rising, and in many organisations is falling. The same judgment now has to be held by fewer people, combined inside individual roles instead of distributed across several.
Part of the reason this is happening now rather than ten years ago is that the cost of different types of work has changed. Specialised and clearly defined tasks are the tasks AI systems perform well. Drafting a first version of a clause, summarising a directive, producing several versions of a headline, checking a document against a fixed list of criteria: the cost of all of this has fallen sharply within three years and continues to fall. What has not fallen is the cost of deciding which output a company is prepared to publish under its own name. That decision requires two types of assessment at the same moment, and dividing it into separate specialist steps costs either time or quality.
The value of a public statement has shifted for a second reason. Content is now abundant and inexpensive to produce, so its existence no longer demonstrates anything. Trust has become the limited resource, and trust depends on whether a reader can identify who is responsible for a statement. When a claim has passed through five departments, responsibility for it is distributed and therefore invisible from outside. The Austrian amendment turns the same test into a legal requirement. Market expectation and regulatory obligation are now asking a company for the same thing, and a company that has spread responsibility for a claim across five departments is slow to deliver it in either direction.
On 7 July 2026, the Nationalrat adopted an amendment to the UWG, the Austrian federal act against unfair competition. The amendment transposes the EmpCo Directive, Directive (EU) 2024/825 on empowering consumers for the green transition, and it applies from 27 September 2026. The legal provisions are set out in detail in my earlier post on the amendment. Every other member state is transposing the same directive, so what follows applies across the EU, with Austria as the worked example.
What matters organisationally is the change in status of certain marketing statements. A term such as "climate-neutral" becomes a claim that must be supported by documented and verifiable environmental performance. A sustainability label designed by the company itself is no longer permitted unless it rests on a recognised certification scheme. A statement about future environmental performance requires a published implementation plan with independent verification behind it.
Under the standard arrangement, marketing develops the message and legal reviews it afterwards. That sequence assumes the claim and its supporting evidence are two separate items, produced by two separate functions, in that order. From 27 September, the supporting evidence determines whether the claim can be made at all. If the evidence file in your organisation is assembled after the sentence has been written, by a person who was not involved when it was written, the approval structure was designed for the previous set of rules.
In a company that has neither function formally, the same change arrives in a different shape. The sentence is written and published without anybody asking the question, because there is nobody whose job it is to ask it.
The cost is rarely a fine. In Austria the visible consequence is an injunction claim brought by a competitor or a Schutzverband, and it is the least common one, while three others occur regularly and are more expensive across a full year.
The first is delay. A company that routes every environmental statement through a function that was absent during its development will need three weeks to publish what a competitor publishes in three days. A company without such a function waits for a different reason, because there is nobody to send the question to and the sentence stays unpublished while somebody decides whether to risk it.
The second is vague messaging. Statements pass sequential review by removing everything specific, and the result is legally safe and commercially useless.
The third is silence, which is both the most common and the most damaging. It already has a name, green hushing, and it describes companies that go quiet on environmental work rather than risk a wrong word. A company that has made a genuine environmental improvement, and that has a fragmented approval process, will often decide to say nothing about it. The improvement appears in an internal report and never in customer-facing material, because no single person is responsible for making a true statement usable. This is the outcome that affects honest companies most directly. The rules were written to remove unsupported claims from the market, and applied to a company with real substance and a divided approval process, they remove the supported claims as well.
The first answer is to send every environmental claim to an external lawyer. That works, and it has two limits worth knowing before relying on it. An external review arrives after the sentence exists, which means the answer is usually to delete or weaken rather than to build, and the stronger version of a claim comes from asking what the company can prove before deciding what it wants to say. A lawyer can also confirm that "packaging made from 100 percent recycled paper" is defensible, while the question of whether that sentence belongs on the front of the package is a separate judgment the review does not produce.
The second answer is to give it to somebody inside who has legal training and a different job. At this size it is often the person handling contracts, or finance, or a founder who studied law. They know enough to recognise a problem, they are already in the building, and asking them costs nothing.
For speed this works better than the external route, and it introduces a difficulty of its own. That person carries the risk personally and holds no share in the upside if the claim performs well. They also have no mandate over the message, so the strongest thing they can do with an uncertain sentence is remove the uncertainty from it. The safe answer is available to them and the ambitious one is not.
The claim comes back weakened, and every person involved has behaved reasonably. This is the case worth understanding, because it shows that adding legal knowledge to a company does not by itself solve the problem. The knowledge has to sit with somebody who also carries the message.
The two disciplines are genuinely different. Legal work trains a person to qualify a statement and to anticipate the most critical reader. Communication work trains a person to commit to a statement and to reach the least attentive reader. That difference is why the functions were separated, and the separation worked for a long time.
The amendment removes the conditions that made it work. Assessing what the directive requires and assessing what the market will understand are now two parts of one decision about one sentence. Made by two people in sequence, each assessment optimises for a different outcome and the result is negotiated down. Made within one role, they are weighed against each other before anything is written.
Coordination between two experts and combination within one role were treated as equivalent for twenty years. Under time pressure they produce different results, and the difference shows up as speed, precision and the willingness to make a clear statement at all.
What any individual company should do about this depends on its size and its existing structure. A company with two hundred employees has options a company with thirty does not. Three things are harder to dispute. The boundary between legal judgment and communication judgment has become unclear in a specific and dated way. Executive teams are contracting while regulatory workload continues to grow. And most companies will reach 27 September with an approval structure that was designed for the previous set of rules.
When do the new green claims rules apply in Austria?
The rules apply from 27 September 2026. The Nationalrat adopted the UWG amendment on 7 July 2026, and it transposes the EmpCo Directive, Directive (EU) 2024/825. Products already on the market before that date have a transition period of three years.
Can we still say "climate-neutral"?
Only where the claim is supported by documented and verifiable environmental performance of the product itself. A climate-neutral claim based on purchased carbon offsets is prohibited from 27 September 2026, even where the offsetting genuinely took place and is fully documented. Describing the measure itself remains permitted, for example funding a specific and verified project.
Can we still talk about sustainability at all?
Yes, and the claims that survive are the specific ones. General words now need certification behind them, while a concrete and provable statement is unaffected and was always the stronger argument.
Is it safer to say nothing?
Silence has become the most common response and it is the most expensive one. Green hushing hands the space to competitors who have less to say and less to lose, and it removes genuine environmental work from the market's view.
What is green hushing?
Green hushing describes a deliberate decision to stay silent about environmental work a company has genuinely done, out of concern about legal or reputational consequences. The company keeps the improvement and says nothing about it. The effect is that provable performance disappears from the market's view, while unsupported claims are removed by the new rules anyway.
Does this apply to small companies too?
Yes, the rules apply regardless of company size. They contain no exemption for small and medium-sized enterprises, and the practical burden is often higher there, because neither a legal nor a communication function exists to ask the question at all.
What do we write instead of "eco-friendly"?
Whatever the company can prove. "Packaging made from 100 percent recycled paper" replaces "environmentally friendly packaging", and it performs better, because a reader can picture it.
Who should write and approve environmental claims?
Whoever decides what the company says now has to know what the company can prove, at the moment the sentence is written rather than afterwards. How that is arranged depends on the company.
Do the green claims rules apply outside Austria?
Yes. Austria is transposing an EU directive that applies across the union from 27 September 2026. The Austrian implementation is the example used here, and the substance is the same in every member state.