Fashion giant Zara pledges to make all its clothing sustainable and eco-friendly by 2025 

Fashion giant Zara will sell only sustainable clothes by 2025.

Parent company Inditex, which also owns labels Pull&Bear and Massimo Dutti, said all the linen, polyester and cotton sold by its brands will be organic, recycled or sustainable within six years. Those materials, alongside viscose, make up 90 per cent of the raw materials used by its brands.

Last month, online fashion retailer ASOS launched a sustainable products option for eco-conscious shoppers. It allows users to select ethically-sourced products from a range of high-profile brands.

Luxury clothing brand Net-a-Porter also launched a sustainable brand in June, called Net Sustain, which aims to promote locally made or sustainable items for customers wary of their environmental footprint.

Containers to collect old clothes for recycling will also appear in Zara stores from next year. Britons send 235million items of clothing to landfill every year, according to the most recent statistics – driven in part by fast-fashion brands selling huge quantities of cheaply made clothes.

Zara is one of the few high street labels to not use plastic bags, and Inditex said all of its brands will stop using plastic bags by 2020. The Spanish company has also committed to eliminating single-use plastic from its outlets by 2023.

The firm also runs a scheme called Join Life to identify clothes that have been made with more eco-friendly materials and processes than ordinary clothes.

Join Life-labelled clothes will make up around one quarter of the items made by Inditex brands this year, adding up to 136million garments.

Inditex chief executive Pablo Isla said: ‘Sustainability is a never-ending task in which everyone here is involved and in which we are successfully engaging all of our suppliers.’