As stated by the firm in the release of its annual report 2022, the Inditex group, presently run by Marta Ortega, will remove its ‘Join Life’ sustainability ‘indicator’ from its clothing. Spanish giant Mango, which also lost its sustainable ‘Committed’ designation at the end of last year, is following in its footsteps by making this choice, which aims to preempt compliance with European legislation.
“We have reached a point in the development of our strategy where it is no longer necessary to differentiate the products in our collections with this label,” explained the company headed by Oscar García Maceiras in its annual report. According to Fashion United España, the environmental impact indicator has disappeared from all of the group’s retail chains.
The ‘Join Life’ label was introduced in 2015 “as a tool to raise awareness among our customers and our staff about the use of raw materials and processes that have a lower impact on the environment as compared to the more widely used practices in the industry,” as stated by Inditex.
Since then, a greater number of ‘Join Life’ products have been introduced to the market. They made up 9 per cent of Inditex’s 528,797 tonnes of goods in 2018; a year later, that percentage had increased to 19 per cent. With 47 per cent of all goods in 2021, ‘sustainable’ clothing was already on track to reach the goal of half of all output. And by 2022, this percentage had increased to 61 per cent of the 621,244 tonnes of goods sold.
Using criteria related to the use of ‘more sustainable raw materials’ like cotton, linen, polyester, and cellulosic fibres as well as the aforementioned presence of clothing with the ‘Join Life’ sustainability label, Inditex describes how it evaluates and measures growth in the number of sustainable articles in the report.
In the past year, 50 per cent of the fibres used by Inditex (which accounted for 88 per cent of production) were of natural origin (i.e., naturally sourced filaments that can be spun into yarns, threads, or cordage), 40 per cent of the remaining fibres were synthetic (made from polymers that are not produced naturally, but are completely produced in a chemical plant or laboratory, almost always from petroleum or natural gas by-products), and 10 per cent were man-made) (formed from a natural component as a raw material that undergoes different transformations in a chemical plant or laboratory).
By bringing up to 78,675 tonnes of recycled materials to market in 2022—a 90 per cent increase from 2021—the company will also be able to leverage recycling.
“To further advance our goals, our sales teams will continue to apply stringent product sustainability criteria and targets as a tool to extend best practices – both in raw materials and processes – to all our collections, and we will continue to use Join Life as an internal standard,” the company said in its annual report regarding the discontinuation of the label.
In order to continue advancing in its ecologically friendly strategy, Inditex is cooperating with the sustainability specialist Quantis. The goal of this collaboration is to carry out detailed Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) for the numerous raw materials and industrial procedures employed in the creation of the clothing.
