Somewhere in your company, right now, someone is writing a product description for your online shop or a caption for tomorrow’s Instagram post. And in that copy, almost without thinking, they’re talking about sustainability, sprinkling in “green”, “eco”, “climate neutral” or “better for the planet”. It reads well, it fits the sentence, and it goes live right away. Until now, that might have been sloppy, but from September 27th on it becomes a legal risk.
Sustainability shows up everywhere, not just where you plan for it
Most brands treat sustainability communication as a dedicated slot. It’s the annual report, the sustainability subpage or a once-a-year impact campaign that the sustainability team signs off on. The problem is just that these days sustainability communication is everywhere. It turns up in eCom product copy, on the packaging, in a press release, in a founder’s LinkedIn post written early in the morning and so on. Every one of those is a public environmental claim, and EmpCo is targeting all of them, whether or not anyone thought of it as “sustainability comms” while writing it. No matter how small or big the company is, the person who actually knows what your company can say is hardly ever the person saying any of it.
Why your sustainability manager turns into a marketing bottleneck
If you have a sustainability manager, their week is already full: data requests, supplier questionnaires, some audits, next year’s report, the ongoing effort to get another department to hand over its numbers on time. Asking them to also read and sign off on every green claim that leaves the building, across every channel, before it publishes, is an undertaking destined to fail.
One of two things happens, and neither is good. Either copy stacks up in a review queue until campaigns lose their timing and the moment passes. Or people quietly stop asking, decide it’s probably fine, and publish without a check, which is precisely how the claims that land companies in trouble make it out the door in the first place. Adding more approval steps doesn’t fix a bottleneck – it cements it. Writing the rules down once, clearly enough that 95% of the cases don’t need an approval, does.
What actually goes into a sustainability comms guideline
A useful guideline reads less like a manifesto and more like an actual manual. Its whole job is to answer the question a writer – no matter which department or experience level – actually has in the moment: can I say this, and if so, how exactly?
At minimum, it should cover the following.
Glossary: The words that are simply off the table like “climate neutral”, “eco-friendly” or “sustainable” and next to each one the phrasing you use instead together with the qualifier that has to come with it. Nobody needs to invent the compliant version under deadline pressure.
Claims Inventory: For each claim the brand wants to make, the guideline records the evidence that backs it up such as the certification, the lifecycle data, the exact percentage and the baseline it’s measured against – whatever the specific claim rests on, along with where that proof lives and when it expires. EmpCo puts the burden of substantiation on you, and a proper inventory is the best way to have everything in one place in case someone requests the source.
Examples: The fastest way to teach a rule is to show before and after: the version that would have gone out, next to the version that is EmpCo-ready. A page of those does most for a team with little experience or knowledge, because it shows the solution instead of simply describing it theoretically.
Visual Assets: As EmpCo doesn’t cover written claims only, but also labels, icons and imagery, the guideline should point to a vetted asset library and define dos and don’ts for future occasions.
Contact: In case the guideline doesn’t cover a specific topic or case, it should define the necessary steps to get from idea to final claim. As sustainability communication is never static, but quickly evolving, the guideline shouldn’t be a static PDF that people save somewhere working with outdated content, but a part of your digital brand book or part of your intranet knowledge base.
How this actually helps the team
Once this is written down, most decisions stop being decisions at all. The junior drafting product copy, the freelancer building the campaign, the agency running your paid social – each of them can consult the guideline, adopt the wording, and keep moving, without a message to the sustainability lead and without stalling the work while they wait for a reply.
Your sustainability manager changes role in the best possible direction: Instead of reviewing social media captions, they own and maintain one document, weigh in only on the genuinely new claims or when there’s an issue e.g. regarding available space for a longer claim or evidence, and get their week back for the work nobody else can do. Legal and compliance finally get the thing they always want and rarely have: any published claim traceable to a source in minutes. New hires and new agencies are handed the rules on day one, rather than absorbing them on the go and getting them subtly wrong for the first six months. The whole system runs faster because the hard thinking happened once, upfront, instead of being re-argued on every single asset.
You don’t have to talk about sustainability often for any of this to be worth the effort. You have to get it right in the handful of moments it does surface, because those are the moments with legal and reputational risk. In the future, a single weak claim is enough to turn a credible brand into someone else’s greenwashing story.
This year we’ve made the communication of more than ten B2C brands EmpCo-ready and handed each team a toolkit they can run on their own. If you’d rather have your rules in place before the deadline than after your first warning letter, let’s talk.