Press Release  AG Campbell Urges Federal Trade Commission to Strengthen Environmental Marketing Standards

BOSTON — Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, in collaboration with the California Attorney General’s Office and fifteen other attorneys general, filed comments urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to strengthen its Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims, commonly known as the Green Guides.

In the comment letter submitted this week to FTC Chair Lina Khan, AG Campbell calls for updates to the federal Green Guides that will close loopholes currently allowing marketers to make broad, often unsubstantiated, claims of environmental benefits of a product or service — claims that are difficult for consumers to evaluate and cause widespread consumer confusion.  For example, many single-use plastic products marketed in Massachusetts as “recyclable,” cannot be recycled through municipal collection programs and instead end up being landfilled or incinerated.

“I’m proud to join attorneys general across the country in standing up for our consumers and our planet by calling on the Federal Trade Commission to modernize and clarify the Green Guides,” said AG Campbell. “If adopted, these updates will help hold companies accountable for charging Massachusetts consumers more for products based on deceptive or misleading claims of environmental impacts or benefits.”

The FTC’s Green Guides, first issued in 1992, address the applicability of section 5 of the FTC Act to environmental advertising and labeling claims to ensure that claims to consumers about environmental benefits of a product are substantiated and not deceptive. The FTC is required to update its Green Guides at least every ten years and it last did so in 2012. 

AG Campbell and the multistate coalition advise the FTC to: make changes to the Guides consistent with consumer expectations and the current state of marketing related to climate change, renewable energy, recycling, and composting benefits; expand the scope of the Guides to consider how the standards for each environmental marketing claim could be clarified and strengthened to better ensure they are supported by real environmental benefits; and not preclude states and localities from enacting stronger standards. 

For example, the states advise that the following be included in updated guidance:

•  The FTC should make explicit that “recyclable” means what the FTC has intended it to mean and what consumers understand it to mean: namely, that when the consumer properly disposes of a “recyclable” item, it is actually recycled as a matter of course.

• When labeling an item as “compostable” marketers must ensure that all components of that item are in fact compostable and will biodegrade within specified time periods.  

• A renewable energy claim should be underwritten by actual environmental benefit, such that marketers who make renewable energy claims must actually procure and use renewable energy.

• Voluntary carbon offsets should ensure a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions that is additional to any reduction that would likely have occurred without the purchase of the offset.

In filing the comment letter, Attorney General Campbell joined the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia. 

This matter was handled by Assistant Attorneys General Tracy Triplett and Andy Goldberg of AG Campbell’s Environmental Protection Division, Deputy Division Chief Elizabeth Anderson and Assistant Attorney General Jo Ann Bodemer of the Energy and Telecommunications Division, and Mercy Cover of the Consumer Protection Division, with assistance from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. 

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