From 27 September 2026, your B2C communications must comply with the EmpCo Directive. Vague claims about the sustainability characteristics of products will no longer be permitted. What should you focus on in the coming weeks, and what can wait until afterwards?

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How do you approach it when your own quality label – and the communications around it – need a thorough review in light of the EmpCo directive? A sector organisation that manages an established quality label for consumer products came to Pantarein with exactly that question. This case study shows what such a project looks like in practice.

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Anyone getting to grips with corporate water strategy will quickly run into an alphabet soup of frameworks: Aqueduct, SBTN, AWS, CDP, GRI 303, ESRS E3, TNFD, the CEO Water Mandate ... Each serves its own purpose and is rarely interchangeable with the others. This insight brings structure to that landscape. Discover how these frameworks complement each other and form the building blocks of a robust water strategy.

As Flanders faces renewed heatwaves and drought, the pressure on businesses keeps building: water is becoming scarcer, regulation stricter, and the impact on operations increasingly tangible. Yet the risk often only becomes visible once it's too late − during a dry summer, a restriction on groundwater extraction, or when a supplier is forced to scale down. This article shows how to move from water risk to water strategy.

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Our region is among the most water-stressed in Europe. According to the World Resources Institute's Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, water demand in Flanders already structurally exceeds supply. Flanders has a negative water balance, and pressure on groundwater keeps rising year after year.

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The causes reinforce one another. Intensive agriculture and industry both require substantial volumes of water. High levels of soil sealing mean rainwater infiltrates less easily. And climate change is driving extremes: heavier downpours that overwhelm rivers and sewer networks, alternating with longer dry spells that deplete water reserves. The dry summers of 2017, 2018, 2022 and 2025 were not exceptions − they were signals of a structural shift.

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For water-dependent businesses − in sectors such as food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, textiles and paper − this translates into concrete risks: water scarcity, restrictions on groundwater extraction, stricter water discharge standards, and rising costs for water intake and treatment.

Many companies that fall outside the CSRD’s scope as a result of the EU Omnibus are finding that the pressure from their supply chain does not disappear with it. Customers, parent companies and banks keep sending ESG questionnaires – on CO₂ emissions, working conditions, governance and supply-chain due diligence. As a supplier or partner, you may not be required to report on these topics, but if you want to maintain the relationship with your key partners, they are hard to ignore.

On 12 August 2026, the first PPWR obligations take effect. Time is short – and in practice, many companies are not ready. Turning the regulation into day-to-day operations is proving harder than expected. So what actually changes in six weeks, and where do companies still get caught out?

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More and more companies are being asked by their customers to prove their sustainability performance through an EcoVadis score. What is driving this shift, how does an EcoVadis assessment work, and how does it interact with sustainability reporting? In this article, we take a closer look.

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On 3 June, the public consultation on the simplified ESRS closed. Now that the ground rules for sustainability reporting under the CSRD are set, the question is this: how do you build a report that works? Among Wave 2 companies – in scope from financial year 2027 – we often hear that compliance and readability are treated as separate goals. “First our report has to meet the auditor’s requirements; the communication can follow later.” That reasoning is understandable, but it leads to duplicated effort and only half the impact. So how should you approach it instead?

The EmpCo Directive prohibits green claims that are not properly substantiated. But what does that actually mean? It starts with a rigorous measurement of your environmental impact – and only ends once that measurement has been translated into a claim that is factually accurate, legally defensible and credible. In this article, we explore how you can build that foundation.

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Today, companies making claims about CO₂ emissions, energy consumption, recyclability or any other environmental attribute must be able to demonstrate that those claims are based on methodologically sound measurement.

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A life cycle assessment (LCA) maps a product's environmental impact across its entire lifespan: from raw material extraction through to end-of-life processing. It is the most robust instrument available for substantiating a green claim under EmpCo.