Environmental Marketing In Europe

Article by Avv. Felix Hofer¹

The European Approach

Up till now the Europe Union did not issue a set of harmonizing principles and rules meant to specifically govern 'environmental/green marketing'.

The main reason for such approach was not disinterest from the EU's institutional bodies towards the issue, but probably the conviction of being the traditional regulations on commercial communication perfectly suitable to cover this specific area in a sufficient and proper way.

In fact, these provisions had already established a number of basic principles requiring all commercial communication to:

• not be misleading to the targeted public²,
• be "readily recognizable as such and be distinguishable from editorial content" (and all surreptitious promotional messages to be explicitly banned)³,