Who: The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Nike Retail BV, Lacoste E-commerce t/a Lacoste and Supergroup Internet Ltd
Where: United Kingdom
When: 3 December 2025
Law stated as at: 16 January 2026
What happened:
The ASA has challenged several ads in the retail fashion sector for overstating environmental benefits.
The ASA prohibited the following ads finding that their sustainability claims were not substantiated:
- Nike’s ad promoted “Nike Tennis Polo Shirts – Serve An Ace With Nike[…]Sustainable Materials”.
- Lacoste’s ad stated “Lacoste Kids – Sustainable […] clothing”.
- Superdry’s ad stated “Superdry: Sustainable Style. Unlock a wardrobe that combines style and sustainability […]”.
Nike said that its ad was a general promotion relating to a wide range of its products and services, rather than being specific to a particular product or service. It said that “sustainable materials” intended to signal that some, but not all, Nike’s products contained materials designed to reduce environmental impact, such as items made from recycled polyester, and that further information was available on its website given the ad’s strict character limits. Clicking the ad led to a product wall for tennis polo shirts some of which included a “sustainable materials” banner, and individual product listings provided composition details via a drop-down tab and links to Nike’s sustainability page.
Lacoste said that it has been working to lower the carbon footprint across its value chain, prioritising the Kids range by increasing certified fabrics – around 78% of online Kids clothing products used certified materials at the time of the ad – and the ad likely linked to the children’s category page. It based the “sustainable” claim on analysis showing environmental footprint reductions across all of the main life cycle stages for the SS25 Kids collection as compared to the SS22 Kids collection.
Superdry acknowledged that, on reviewing the ad, the full life cycle of their products was not publicly available and, as such, the ad had been produced in error.
The ASA has said that the claim “sustainable” was absolute, requiring a high level of substantiation, and that without qualification, this claim was ambiguous and unclear. It was likely to be understood as implying that the advertised products at the very least had no detrimental impact on the environment across their lifecycle, but the companies had not provided evidence to demonstrate this. The ASA did not agree with Nike’s argument about lack of space in the ad – it considered that the ad was not limited by time or space to such an extent that the information could not be provided.
Why this matters
These rulings reiterate the importance of both the wording and substantiation of environmental claims as well as the choice of media through which such claims are published. Increasingly, the ASA and CMA are not accepting arguments regarding space limitations as a justification for non-compliance, viewing such constraints as the result of a poor choice of media mix rather than genuine barriers to legal compliance. Accordingly, the suitability of space-limited media (for example, banner ads, sponsored search ads and social media posts), needs to be carefully considered where regulators expect to see certain claims carefully explained.
