Hatta Dolmat is Malaysia’s first designer in the local fashion business to embrace a wholly sustainable attitude from the production to the final collections.
Since the textile and fast fashion industry is claimed to be the second-largest polluting industry for the environment after oil and gas, Hatta Dolmat has been proactively looking for new avenues to merge fashion and environmental sustainability.
Photo via Hatta Dolmat
This year, in line with the Hatta Dolmat’s: Sustainable Awareness Movement and his 15 years celebration in the fashion industry, he will be releasing the HD Monogram RTW sustainable collection during KLFW Digital 2020 in November.
The HD Monogram RTW sustainable collection is a tripartite collaboration between Hatta Dolmat, SWCorp, and Kloth Cares, and it’s aimed to educate Malaysians that plastic bottles can have new life with a higher purpose if recycled into fabrics.
Photo via Hatta Dolmat
With the factual data of textile waste collected by SWCorp yearly, Hatta and Kloth Cares are working closely together in selecting the best method in producing the HD Monogram RTW sustainable collection.
HD Monogram is produced from high quality fabrics in collaboration with Kloth Cares who supplies the sustainable fabrics; produced from bottles which consist of 60% recycled plastic bottle yarns (rPET) weaved with 40% cotton (organic fibre).
Hatta Dolmat is also the first local fashion designer who was able to experiment with the printed method and the colour absorbent resulted with the recycled fabric material made from plastic bottles.
He said: “It’s really the job of fashion designers now to turn things on their head in a different way, and not just try to turn a dress on its head every season. Try and ask questions about how you make that dress, where you make that dress, what materials you are using. I think that is far more interesting, actually. I think that the way to create sustainable fashion is to keep asking these questions while making sure to make desirable, luxurious, beautiful clothing and accessories that consumers want to buy.”
Every year, a massive number of plastic bottles is consumed in Malaysia, and most plastic wastes more often than not, ends up in landfills and waterways causing devastating effects on sea life and the well-being of the environment, but with proper waste management and cultivating the 3R lifestyle of reducing, reusing and recycling, every small effort creates a footprint that helps to clean the environment.
“As we all know, plastic bottles take forever to decompose. Therefore, turning plastic bottles into high-quality fabrics will ensure that plastic bottles are given new life and purpose,” he added.
But, the question is, how is it made?
KLOTH Lifestyle collects clear plastic bottles from waste processors around the country and shreds them into plastic flakes.
The plastic flakes are then cleaned and converted into pellets and spun into polyester yarn.
The Recycled Polyethylene Terephthalate (RPET), also known as Recycled Polyester is:
90% less water is used in making recycled polyester versus polyester
RPET requires 70% less energy than virgin fibre production
Recycling one plastic bottle saves the equivalent of 3 hours of energy from a 60 watt light bulb and 1 kg of RPET keeps 60 water bottles out of the landfill
What a great effort in helping the environment!
By: Aishah Akashah Ahadiat
