This year for the first time, the Sustainable City Awards, the UK's foremost green business awards scheme, have partnered with the British Fashion Council to recognise and celebrate eco-friendly fashion.

There will be two Sustainable Fashion awards up for grabs - one for the best independent fashion designer and another for the leading high street retailer.

The winners will be revealed in a ceremony at the Lord Mayor's residence next spring, which will be hosted by green style icon Livia Firth (and wife of Colin), who hit the headlines earlier this year for her Green Carpet Challenge, in which she pledged only to wear only eco-friendly dresses on the red carpet.

READ: Livia Firth kicks off her 2012 Green Carpet Challenge at the Golden Globes in Giorgio Armani

Firth said: "With the Green Carpet Challenge, we have taken huge steps towards combining style and ethics in fashion. I am very excited to be hosting this award ceremony which will bring more awareness to this cause and inspire responsibility amongst designers and retailers to adopt sustainable fashion."

READ: Livia Firth: "Once you've seen how a factory producing throwaway fashion operates, you can never really go back to the high street"

Simon Mills, head of sustainable development at the City of London Corporation is also excited about the new category: "Fashion and sustainability are a good mix, as couture impacts on hearts and minds as well as the planet," he explained. "We were in fact we were inspired to create this category by one of the entries to last years' awards, the fabulous "Thrifty Couture" , who are a fantastic example of fashion driving local sustainable economic growth."

Established in Summer 2011, Thrifty Couture specialise in up-cycling garments - taking unloved clothes and turning them into something covetable with the help of young unemployed people and older retired residents from the London boroughs of Hackney, Islington and South Camden who have been trained and employed as dressmakers.

Via: Livia Firth and the BFC partner for the Sustainable City Awards