Syukriyatun Niamah is only 29 years old, but she is already making an impact on both the design and sustainability industries in Asia. Robries was an idea Syukriyatun had while in college in 2016. With a background in product design, she found herself asking why plastic waste wasn’t a concern for more people, in particular, young adults. “There is no waste management here in Indonesia,” she said. “Everyone just throws it away and I was curious as to why people don’t care more. At the same time, people seemed to be asking, ‘What are you going to do if I do care?’”
To answer that question, Syukriyatun, along with three co-founders, started Robries in 2018. It is a design studio that creates high-quality, robust furniture pieces using discarded HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) bottle caps which are sorted, cleaned, shredded and then melted down into polymer sheets to be moulded and cut. Robries’ plastics are used in everything from stools and tables to facades and are known to be stain-proof, weatherproof and strong. On the sustainability front, the company has already upcycled over 200 million bottle caps, saving over 64 tonnes of plastic from landfills.
Initially, Syukriyatun experimented with different types of plastic, looking for the best way to contribute to sustainability in Indonesia and also for a material that would be impactful from a design perspective. As there were already many recycling centres for PET bottles in her native Surabaya, she settled on HDPE bottle caps, which are harder for those centres to manage. She discovered that “roasting” them created both a beautiful and sturdy material. It was also the inspiration for the company name, which amalgamates “roasted bottles and accessories”.
