Leading clothing brands have been reprimanded for making ambiguous and unclear sustainability claims. Food and drink businesses should take note. By David Burrows.

“There’s one rule every marketing team should know: Never claim anything is ‘sustainable’. It really is that simple.”

So noted Michael Lenaghan, associate director at Anthesis, the consultancy, last week. His social media post came on the back of new rulings from the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) relating to adverts by three clothing brands (stay with me). These were:

• A paid-for Google ad for Nike, seen on June 18th 2025, stated “Nike Tennis Polo Shirts – Serve An Ace With Nike[…]Sustainable Materials”.
• lothingA paid-for Google ad for Lacoste, seen on June 24th 2025, stated “Lacoste Kids – Sustainable […] clothing”.
• A paid-for Google ad for Superdry, seen on June 30th 2025, stated “Superdry: Sustainable Style. Unlock a wardrobe that combines style and sustainability […]”.

The ads were identified for investigation following intelligence gathering by the ASA’s active ad monitoring system which uses AI to proactively survey ads in specific sectors. Fashion is currently in the regulator’s cross-hairs, but the technology has also been used to red flag green adverts in the travel sector too. It’s surely only a matter of time before food company claims face the same level of scrutiny. 

Each clothing ad was found to be misleading, lacking in substantiation and breached the rules for making environmental claims under the CAP Code. 

The Lacoste ruling is worth reading. This is a company with carbon reduction goals that have been validated by the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi). The evidence for claims had been thought through in detail, based on life cycle analyses conducted on “all products in the Lacoste Kids collection”. 

The company’s evidence to the ASA explained that each product was individually assessed using “a consistent impact calculation method (in accordance with ISO 14040 and 14044 standards) – each product score was then combined each season to evaluate the average environmental performance of the entire Lacoste Kids collection season by season. Based on that, Lacoste compared the environmental footprint by life cycle analysis of the Spring Summer 2025 (SS25) Kids collection with that of the Spring Summer 2022 (SS22) Kids collection.”

Lacoste also provided analysis that showed a reduction in the environmental footprint across all of the main life cycle stages (raw materials, packaging, manufacturing, distribution, use phase and end-of-life) for the SS25 Kids collection compared to the SS22 collection. That included a 19% reduction in the environmental footprint of the raw materials used in 2025 (compared to the 2022 baseline), and a 17% reduction for manufacturing.

This is all impressive – and likely quite expensive – with the company having read and understood most of the guidance that’s been published on this by regulators in the past couple of years.  The problem was the fashion and sports brand then took all this homework and claimed the clothes were ‘sustainable’, without qualification that consumers had access to. This made the ad “ambiguous and unclear”  – a no-no as far as such claims are concerned.

Indeed, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) guidance ‘Complying with consumer law when making environmental claims in the fashion retail sector’ also states that broader, general or absolute claims such as “sustainable” are likely to mislead consumers, and that their meaning is unclear. 

It is easy to understand why Lacoste went for the advert. The qualification for the claim amounted to 426 words. The claim itself ran to just four. 

Lacoste acknowledged that it had made a mistake, with terms like ‘sustainable’ “very difficult to substantiate”. That is perhaps an understatement. As Lenaghan at Anthesis noted: “It is one thing to claim, with evidence (!) something is more sustainable (e.g. than an earlier version, or a credible alternative). But nothing is inherently, universally, capital-S Sustainable.”

He used the example of a paper cup, which “might seem objectively sustainable because it uses a renewable material. But what if you scale production from 100 thousand cups a year, to 100 billion? Or what if there are myriad other demands for the same ‘renewable’ resource (e.g. paper, lumber, biofuel etc.)?”

The point Lenaghan makes is that ‘sustainable’ is not a constant attribute of a product, but rather, a delicately balanced, highly complex attribute of a system. That makes it extremely difficult to assess, let alone credibly assign to a single product within that system. 

Indeed, the CMA’s green claims guidance states that consumers are likely to assume from the use of the term that the product about which it is used as a whole had a positive environmental impact, or at least no adverse impact. 

Press on with PR

Claiming something is ‘sustainable’ is (likely) always a green claims no-no. There are loopholes however; ones that companies can squeeze through with even AI unable to watch everything, everywhere and all at once.

One of the most used and least monitored loopholes are press releases and ESG communications. This has been highlighted by Footprintpreviously, with neither the CMA nor ASA regulating these frequent communications. 

As far as press releases go, it is up to journalists to provide the relevant checks – but who has the time to do this in the current news cycle? Stories are often published within minutes of corporate statements being uploaded.

It’s ironic that the ASA has found itself the subject of a challenge relating to its own advertising. The New Weather Institute and Badvertising campaign asked the authority to investigate its own ads for allegedly breaching the rules around misleading advertising. 

The complaint relates to an ASA campaign including adverts that stated for example: “We regulate ads, wherever you see or hear them”, and “The ASA makes sure UK ads stick to the rules. Simples”. This is stretching the truth, wrote Andrew Simms, co-director of the New Weather Institute and co-founder of the Badvertising campaign, in a piece for The Ecologist. “Our complaint says that the ASA’s actually quite limited remit means, in fact, that it cannot regulate ads seen and heard by large audiences daily, across various physical and online media,” he explained. 

This includes ads on an advertiser’s own vehicles, and those by companies based outside of the UK if they are on platforms also headquartered outside of the UK. Plus, according to the ASA’s remit for regulating social media advertising, it does not act “when a brand publishes a communication on their own website or social media page” when this isn’t paid-for content. “[Our] complaint notes that although a large proportion of companies’ social media posts and website content act to build a company’s brand – a recognised form of advertising – this is outside of the ASA’s remit,” Simms wrote.

So slipping through the net would be press releases uploaded to company websites and the pages relating to its ESG commitments and progress. And we already know from previous Footprint requests that the ASA does not regulate the press releases sent out to national, trade and consumer media.

The ASA’s ads “give the impression that the ASA is a powerful and effective regulator, which we dispute”, said Simms, adding: “Seeing an ad regulator publish its own misleading ads merely reveals how broken is the current model of largely voluntary, self-regulation of an industry that daily promotes the kind of high carbon lifestyles that undermine all our futures.”

Time to greenwash

The time lag between an investigation going live and the ruling are a constant bugbear, too. Indeed, the ASA may well be picking up more greenwashing but the adverts have already worked their magic, with campaigns ruled to be misleading after a year or more old. 

ESG communications, like net-zero targets, have been picked up by regulators, especially in the US where big meat companies like Tyson and JBS have been targeted for dubious claims relating to things like net-zero and climate-friendly beef (see last week’s Friday Digest). Whether they have got away with it is moot. “Can they just lie, get caught and then claim they didn’t do anything wrong?” wondered Nusa Urbancic, CEO at Changing Markets Foundation, an NGO specialising in highlighting greenwashing across sectors with large environmental footprints, like food.

Companies that have stuck to the rules may well feel aggrieved at the state of affairs. Indeed, many of those who are making the largest strides in relation to greenhouse gas emissions reductions, single-use packaging reduction and the like, have stopped making any claims relating to sustainability – which makes them look less ‘green’ than those that mislead and get away with it, and even those that mislead and are pulled up by regulators.

The light touch approach to such regulation should have ended now the CMA has its new powers to fine companies big money for greenwashing. However, it’s not clear whether it will have the capacity or will to do so. “This is everything, everywhere, all at once,” warned Dominic Watkins, head of consumer sector at DWF, at a Footprint legal briefing in April last year to discuss the new powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCCA). But “not much has happened since”, Watkins told those at the most recent foodservice industry legal briefingheld in September.

So, for now it is hard to make robust green claims, but easy to get away with making dubious ones – especially in corporate communications.