The French Eco-score, part of the 2021 Climate and Resilience Law, is also known as “environmental labeling” or “affichage environnemental” and will enter into force on October 1st, 2025.
You can read all the updates and everything you need to know in our deep dive here. Here are the key facts:
- Currently voluntary, however
- If your French website already displays a single environmental score (for example, a carbon footprint on product pages), you are required to also display the official Environmental Cost label from 1st October 2025.
- If you do not upload a Score yourself until 1st October 2026, any third party can do it for you based on publicly available data. This will lead to more unfavorable scores, due to the application of conservative default values where data is missing.
Carbonfact recommends that you be proactive and calculate your French Eco-Score yourself.
Carbonfact and the Eco-Score
Carbonfact automatically generates Eco-Scores for all apparel products covered by the French regulation, including both the mandatory and optional data parameters. This leads to accurate Eco-Scores that present the full picture, rather than conservative default assumptions used in lieu of missing optional parameters.
Though brands can do this using Ecobalyse’s freely-available tool, Carbonfact takes away the stress of needing to enter product data manually, one by one, and in a French-only interface.
Update 1: Accurate and Complete Eco-Scores
We started by strengthening the foundations to make sure every score is both precise and regulator-ready. This meant refining durability parameters (like repair incentives), improving country-level mapping for dyeing, assembly, and fabric steps, and integrating product-level details such as air transport or printing share. We also corrected metrics so that only eligible products are included, and ensured that missing material mappings never distort results.
On top of this, we added support for:
- multi-component products,
- trims and accessories,
- upcycled content,
- parsing of printing surface area.
Finally, we updated our logic so that heuristics, the data-driven assumptions used in Life Cycle Assessments, never interfere with official Ecobalyse submissions.
The result: Eco-Scores that are both accurate and complete, fully aligned with ADEME and Ecobalyse’s requirements, and ready for portal submission.
Update 2: Benchmarking at the Product Level
After that, we went further – moving from accuracy to context. Brands can now benchmark their Eco-Score on a per-product basis within the Carbonfact platform, comparing directly against category averages. Where we previously released a free, manual entry tool, we’ve now directly integrated this into Carbonfact, automating all benchmarks on top of the already existing (and previously automated) Eco-Score calculations.
This addresses one of the most frequent customer questions: “How do we know if our score is good or bad compared to others in our segment?” Instead of relying on external studies, Carbonfact now provides real-time, product-level benchmarks. This helps teams understand where they stand, and where to improve.
For every benchmarked product, Carbonfact highlights the optional data parameters that matter most – helping you focus collection efforts where they’ll have the biggest impact on a product’s Eco-Score.
Why This Matters
The Eco-Score is moving quickly from voluntary to a “voluntary with consequences”, and many brands risk being caught off guard. Conservative default values applied by third party calculations on behalf of your brand can paint an unfair picture that often result in artificially unfavorable scores. By investing early and deeply, we’re ensuring our customers’ scores are the most accurate, contextualized, and compliant.
These updates build on Carbonfact’s deep integration with the French Eco-Score – a commitment that has been publicly endorsed by Ecobalyse.
Martin Daniel
Lidia Lüttin
