Greenwashing the greenwashers?

When the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced an investigation into misleading green claims on consumer products, including food, WildFish provided masses of evidence to the CMA about the claims being made for Scottish farmed salmon. In this blog, Guy Linley-Adams explores the latest revelation – specifically, that the CMA currently has no open investigations into misleading green claims for any products, not just farmed salmon.

Back in January 2023, the CMA announced it was going to start investigating greenwashing and potentially misleading green claims made in relation to a wide range of “fast moving consumer products”, in other words the kind of household items we buy in the supermarket… including food and drink.

At the time, Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the CMA, said:

“These products are the essentials on everyone’s shopping lists: food and drink, shampoo, laundry detergent, toothpaste, cleaning products.

…we’re concerned many shoppers are being misled and potentially even paying a premium for products that aren’t what they seem, especially at a time when the cost of living continues to rise.

Our work to date has shown there could be greenwashing going on in this sector, and we’ll be scrutinising companies big and small to see whether their environmental claims stack up…”

So, knowing what we know about the claims made by the Scottish salmon farming industry, in October 2023 WildFish submitted a detailed dossier to the CMA. For more information see WildFish and community groups raise alarm on ‘sustainable’ greenwashing claims made by Scottish salmon farming industry and  Time to call an end to the greenwashing of Scottish farmed salmon. 

We followed up on our submission by asking the CMA how they were getting on with the investigation but the CMA said “we are not able to give updates on complaints”.

Time ticked by.

And we started to have doubts.

So, in August 2024, ten months after our submission, we made a formal request for information, asking the CMA how many contacts it had had about potentially misleading green claims since the announcement in January 2023 and what products had been examined as part of the wide range of products that it was going to investigate.

The CMA responded, saying they had had 37 contacts about potentially misleading green claims in the fast-moving consumer goods sector (which we hoped and assumed included the detailed representation made by Wildfish about Scottish salmon farming).

However, the CMA pointed out that Part 9 of the Enterprise Act 2002 meant it was not able to publish information which related to the affairs of any business, so it couldn’t say which products it was looking at. Fair enough.

But we also asked how many unfounded green claims had been identified by the CMA, across all products, but the CMA wouldn’t say, arguing that disclosing that information “would be likely to prejudice its conduct and impeded the CMA’s ability to take effective action to protect the public”.

So, today, what do we know?

Well, the CMA opened an investigation into Unilever UK Limited in December 2023, but  closed it less than a year later in November 2024, with the CMA citing that Unilever had made “positive changes”.

But that’s it.

Nothing else has been published.

Nada.

Not a sausage.

So, this March, we asked a friendly MP to ask some PQs in the House of Commons for us, to assess if anything else had happened that the CMA wasn’t publicising.

The Written Answers to those PQs reveal that in the period following the January 2023 announcement the CMA says it carried out an initial review of “hundreds of products”, but by March 2025, “the CMA does not currently have any open investigations into misleading environmental claims”

No-one seriously believes that greenwashing isn’t happening, including when it comes to Scottish farmed salmon.

So, CMA, the question for you is this.

If you announce a big investigation into greenwashing in 2023, but two years, and only one truncated investigation later, quietly end that investigation, does that amount to greenwashing the greenwashers?

By: Guy Linley-Adams

Solicitor