The Law is catching up on Greenwashing companies

For years, companies making misleading environmental claims faced little more than bad press. A campaign group would raise the alarm, a brand would issue a careful non-apology, and the cycle would begin again. In 2025, that changed.

The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came fully into force on 6 April 2025, giving the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) the power to impose fines of up to 10% of a company's global annual turnover for misleading environmental claims, without needing to go through the courts. For a major multinational company, that is a number that concentrates minds in boardrooms.

The Chemical Recycling myth

Chemical recycling sits squarely in the crosshairs. For years, consumer-facing brands have labelled products as "made with recycled plastic" or "recyclable" on the basis of pyrolysis processes that, as we have seen in this series, yield as little as 5% usable recycled material. Those claims are now legally vulnerable. Legal experts at Fieldfisher have noted that vague, unsubstantiated, or incomplete environmental messaging falls squarely within the CMA's enforcement priorities.

The pressure tightened further at the start of 2026. On 22 January 2026, the CMA published new guidance titled "Making green claims: Getting it right, across the supply chain," making clear that responsibility for a misleading claim does not rest solely with the brand whose logo appears on the packaging. Every business in the supply chain that repeats, relies on, or passes along an environmental claim is now expected to verify it. A brand can no longer point to a chemical recycling supplier's certification and consider itself absolved.

This series has traced a single thread: an industry that promised and then failed to deliver a technological fix, shipped the consequences overseas, and dressed the whole thing up as progress. The law is slowly catching up.

Share this series with people who need to see it, and demand better from the brands and policymakers who have let this crisis fester for far too long.

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For more information contact: info@scarabtrust.org.uk

Images: 50 pc recycled - AI image (ST ref: 1374)

Greenwashing synonyms - Image from spunout.ie (ST ref: 1297)