Responding to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) notice soliciting public comment on its guidelines for the use of environmental marketing claims (Green Guides), the American Apparel & Footwear Association (AAFA) recently raised questions about claim substantiation, expressed interest in mechanisms to ensure adherence to the guidelines and demanded changes to labelling rules to facilitate clear and substantiated claims.

As first steps, setting clear requirements for ‘sustainable’ and other vague claims, providing realistic conditions for recycling and compostable claims, and restricting confusing climate change related claims will improve the Green Guides, AAFA president and chief executive officer Stephen Lamar wrote to FTC chair Lina Khan.

Addressing concerns about claim substantiation and accountability for non-compliance are necessary, he wrote.

“We also hope the FTC will take action to enable easy communication of environmental claims by undertaking labelling modernisation,” the letter said.

AAFA looks forward to updated guidelines on the issue, he said.

Environmentally ‘sustainable’ claims are ‘partial’ claims as actual, 'whole' environmental sustainability would entail that a company’s operations, and the negative impacts on the planet of production and placement for sale on a market of a product, and the product’s entire life cycle, are in one way or another completely mitigated, he wrote.

“The dissonance between the partial claim intended by ‘sustainable’ and the whole, unqualified claims on products could explain the mismatch between consumer interest and trust found in survey research,” the letter wrote.

AAFA believes FTC has sufficient basis to advise companies against making unqualified environmentally ‘sustainable’ product-level claims and does not want to encourage ‘greenhushing’.

AAFA and its members believe that product-level ‘carbon neutral’ claims that entirely rely on the use of offsets should be prohibited.

Companies that want to specifically advertise that they purchase carbon offsets, should be allowed to do so, provided those offsets are verified by independent organisations, the letter said.

AAFA believes clearer guidance on claim substantiation is necessary to ensure companies can confidently make accurate claims. The current guidance on this is ‘vague’. AAFA urges FTC to work closely with counterparts in the European Union and seek to harmonise claim substantiation requirements.

Claims made on social media and online marketplace platforms are particularly problematic, the letter noted.

The precise, qualified claims and accompanying substantiation our members want to provide do not fit nicely on hang tags. With only minor changes, FTC could easily update the interpretation of labelling requirements to allow a digital access point to direct consumers to all the required product information associated with an environmental claim, the letter suggested.