Businesses have never had more to say about sustainability, or more reason to choose their words carefully.
From 27 September 2026, EU consumer protection rules will place stricter limits on the environmental claims that businesses can use when marketing to EU consumers. At the same time, the first companies have achieved certification under B Lab’s more rigorous global standards.
These are two different developments, with the same direction of travel: businesses must be able to back up what they say about sustainability and show meaningful action behind their claims.
In short:
- New EU rules strengthen protection against greenwashing and restrict certain generic environmental and offsetting-based claims
- B Lab’s new standards now require companies to meet mandatory independently verified minimum requirements across seven Impact Topics, with continuing improvement built into certification.
- Responsible business evidence is becoming easier for buyers to find, while some public-sector tenders explicitly measure responsible procurement and social value.
These developments do not make certification essential, but it does make credible, independently assessed evidence more commercially valuable.
Why the bar for sustainable business evidence is rising
The EU’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (ECGT) Directive aims to help consumers make informed purchasing decisions and support more sustainable consumption.
From 27 September 2026, it will strengthen protections against greenwashing. It restricts generic terms such as ‘eco-friendly’, ‘green’ and ‘climate-friendly’ unless businesses can demonstrate recognised excellent environmental performance. It also prohibits claims that a product is ‘climate neutral’ or has a reduced environmental impact when these rely on carbon offsetting outside the product’s value chain.
The directive will apply through the consumer laws of individual EU member states. UK businesses may also be affected where their sales or marketing is directed towards consumers in those countries even if they are not based in the EU. It mainly applies to B2C marketing, rather than every form of business communication.
Alongside this, B Lab’s new global standards introduce mandatory performance requirements across seven Impact Topics, subject to independent third-party assurance. The first companies certified under them in June 2026. There are fixed improvement milestones in years three and five, so certification is not something a company achieves once and then forgets about.
As a B Corp, we know certification can be demanding and sometimes uncomfortable, because it forces a business to examine the gap between what it says and how it operates, and how it evidences it. But that is exactly where the value lies.
What works now: say less, prove more
Overclaiming is the obvious danger: impressive-sounding language that falls apart as soon as somebody asks to see the evidence.
Going quiet or ‘greenhushing’ carries its own risk. If a business has done the hard work and can prove it, fear of saying anything at all leaves the field open to competitors with a clearer story.
Are we at a turning point?
One idea that gave me real cause for optimism during my Business Sustainability Management course with the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership was Carlota Perez’s work on technological revolutions.
Perez’s research shows that big technological shifts usually don’t follow a smooth path. An early rush of excitement and investment is often followed by a turbulent turning point before new technologies move into mainstream use. What happens next depends partly on whether governments, businesses and society put the right rules, investment and institutions around them.
During the course, we looked at the Industrial Revolution as an example. New machinery brought legitimate fears about jobs, wages and working conditions, as well as resistance to the way change was being imposed. Yet the transition continued, while regulation, working practices and society gradually adapted around it.
Perez was not writing specifically about sustainability, but her framework feels relevant to where we are now. After years of ambitious promises and glossy reports, ESG has become politically charged and people are understandably asking whether enough has really changed.
But that pushback does not necessarily mean the transition is failing. We could be at the point when some of the hype falls away, weaknesses are exposed and the serious work begins: putting the regulation, standards and business practices in place to turn ambition into lasting change.
One encouraging sign is that climate and nature-related risks are no longer being considered only within sustainability teams or environmental organisations. They have entered national-security thinking.
A government-commissioned assessment of global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse was compiled by the Joint Intelligence Committee – which brings together the heads of organisations including MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. The assessment was reportedly blocked before a redacted version was eventually released – a decision explored by Caroline Lucas in a July 2026 episode of The Rest Is Politics.
The redacted assessment, released in January 2026, warned that ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten the UK’s security and prosperity. It warned that ecosystem degradation could lead to food and water insecurity, conflict, migration and growing competition between countries for resources.
This was not an environmental campaign group making the case. It came from the heart of Britain’s national security establishment.
The conclusions are alarming, but their source gives me cause for optimism. Climate and environmental risks are becoming matters of economic resilience, resource security and national self-interest. They are no longer simply questions of environmental belief.
As those consequences become harder to ignore, the debate may begin to change. Businesses and governments do not all need to arrive at action through the same values or language. If the need to secure resources, protect supply chains and manage material risks brings a much broader group of stakeholders into the transition, meaningful change becomes more achievable.
The new EU rules and B Corp standards could be signs of that next phase, one in which sustainability becomes less about expansive promises and more about credible evidence, accountable action and measurable progress.
When evidence starts to matter to buyers
Procurement is where this evidence can start to make a commercial difference. In January 2026, EcoVadis announced that Amazon Business sellers that had earned one of its medals or badges could display it on their profiles, making independently assessed sustainability performance easier for buyers to identify.
You can already see this happening in public-sector tendering. Since 2022, the Greater London Authority has required contracts worth more than £150,000 to allocate at least 10% of their evaluation criteria to responsible procurement and social value.
Credentials can make responsible-business performance easier to recognise, but buyers are ultimately interested in the evidence and practice behind the badge.
Analysis by B Lab UK for its 2025 Take 10 Impact report found evidence of greater resilience among the UK B Corps in its study. Using a large comparison dataset and technical support from The Data City, it found that 92.6% remained active between 2020 and the point of analysis, compared with 84.2% of the wider UK comparison group.
Over the previous decade, B Corps in the study that secured external growth funding received a median of £1.5 million – reported by B Lab UK as 18% more than the £1.3 million median for other UK businesses in the comparison group.
B Corp certification will not be the only reason for that difference, but the figures add to the evidence that purpose-led businesses can also be resilient and commercially successful.
For the businesses Midnight works with – insurers, protection providers, professional advisers and workplace specialists – trust is part of the product. Unsupported claims create risk, while credible evidence helps reduce it.
That matters whether you are communicating with a regulator, advising a client, responding to a tender or asking employees to believe in the values on your website.
What this means for responsible businesses
Businesses have always needed more than a compelling story. What is changing is how quickly customers, buyers and regulators can check the evidence behind it.
A sustainability badge itself is not the business case in itself, and certification doesn’t automatically make a company more successful. The value lies in the discipline behind it: better governance, clearer evidence, more transparency, continued improvement and fewer gaps between what a business says and what it does.
Doing the work matters. Being able to prove it matters too.
If you’re building a more responsible business and want to communicate your progress clearly and credibly, without overclaiming or retreating into silence, get in touch. We’d be pleased to help.
Find out more about our work with B Corps here.
