\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>f you\u2019ve been on a college campus in the last 30 years, you\u2019ve likely come across red party cups. Made by brands like Solo and Hefty, the iconic cups are beloved by frats, crucial to drinking games like beer pong \u2013 and very difficult to recycle because of the type of plastic they\u2019re made from.<\/p>\n But Lauren Choi, an engineering student at Johns Hopkins University, saw an opportunity: she wanted to turn these problematic cups into fabric. In 2019, during her senior year, she led a team that built an extruder machine that could spin plastic waste into textile filaments. They partnered with campus fraternities to gather thousands of red cups that could serve as the raw material.<\/p>\n Choi then took a weaving class at a Baltimore, Maryland, maker space so she could make a sample fabric out of those filaments. That became the foundation for The New Norm, a textile company that today transforms a variety of post-consumer recycled plastic into stylish sweatshirts and beanies.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve always thought long-term,\u201d Choi said. \u201cAnd that helps me look beyond the next couple years, [to the] bigger picture, where globally, [the plastic crisis] is something we need to address.\u201d<\/p>\n The company is a natural extension of Choi\u2019s longstanding concern about the dual climate and plastics crises and a deep connection to fashion. She had been sewing since she was a child, interned at a swimwear company earlier in college, and \u2013 before teaming up with classmates \u2013 spent a summer trying to build an extruder machine in her parents\u2019 garage. \u201c[The New Norm] really tied my interests together,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n After graduating in 2020, Choi raised grant funding so she could dive more into product development. \u201cThat helped it go from a passion project to a real, real project,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n <\/span> Isabelle Callaghan, Alicia Furlan, Lauren Choi, and Camille Afable pose for portraits in the party sweater made out of recycled plastic in Boston, Massachusetts, on 13 September 2025. <\/span> Photograph: Faith Ninivaggi\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Choi started working with suppliers who source plastics from recycling facilities across the country. \u201cRecycled [materials are] still the wild west,\u201d she said. \u201cWe received batches that were unusable or contaminated or too mixed. It was a lot of trial and error to find the right people.\u201d<\/p>\n Another challenge: Up until that point, the fabric coming out of the extruder still had a distinctly brittle, plastic feel \u2013 it didn\u2019t feel wearable like a traditional textile. So Choi reached out to Gaston College\u2019s Textile Technology Center, just outside Charlotte, North Carolina, for help.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you\u2019re going to produce a knit garment, it needs to be comfortable,\u201d said Jasmine Cox, the center\u2019s executive director. \u201cIt needs to be breathable, cozy, things that people love. It can\u2019t feel like a plastic cup.\u201d<\/p>\n Cox\u2019s team, along with people at the Polymers Center in North Carolina, helped Choi develop a custom formula that could be fed into extruders to produce soft textiles. \u201cOur entire goal [was] to get her to that point where it was plug and play,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n It took them a couple years, and more grant funding (from Johns Hopkins, Garnier, and Reynolds Consumer Products, Hefty\u2019s parent company, among others), to get to that point. The New Norm released its first, direct-to-consumer collection of sweaters and beanies in late 2023. Made from 5,000 upcycled party cups, the drop sold out in two months.<\/p>\n Choi works with textile facilities in North Carolina and Virginia to produce The New Norm\u2019s yarn, much of which is then shipped to Brooklyn, where a manufacturer uses 3D printers to produce sweatshirts and beanies, which retail between $45 and $85.<\/p>\n \u201c3D knitting has a lot less waste compared to traditional cut-and-sew, where many fabric scraps are wasted,\u201d Choi said. \u201cInstead, our pieces are knit straight out of the machine without any seams \u2013 it\u2019s just one full garment that doesn\u2019t need additional sewing.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span> Alicia Furlan and Camille Afable model the party sweaters and party beanie made out of recycled plastics by The New Norm.<\/span> Photograph: Faith Ninivaggi\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Even though the company now uses a variety of plastics, multicolored party cups still make up most of the raw materials in its own line. The items\u2019 pink, blue and green pastel hues come from the cups themselves rather than added dyes. Choi said her yarn is made from continuous filaments, rather than fibers that are spun together, which means it\u2019s less likely to shed harmful microplastics.<\/p>\n The New Norm is still a lean operation: Choi, who recently moved to Boston to pursue an MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said at any given time there are between three and 25 people working at the company. She declined to share sales figures, but said that in the last two years production had expanded from tens of pounds per run to thousands.<\/p>\n Choi said she aims to expand the business-to-business side of The New Norm, which she sees as offering the biggest opportunity for an environmental impact.<\/p>\n \u201cFrom the beginning, our goal has been to get to a place where we can scale production and work with really large brands who are using significant quantities of materials,\u201d she said. The New Norm is undergoing pilots with large brands, testing everything from the strength of the yarn to how well it launders, with the goal of developing and selling the material at a much larger scale.<\/p>\n This aligns with where some experts see the industry going, as a growing number of companies rethink where they source their raw materials. One report found that the sustainable textile market was valued globally at $29.5bn in 2024, and is expected to hit $71bn by 2031. (While what constitutes \u201csustainable\u201d is somewhat nebulous, most research defines it as textiles made with eco-friendly material, including recycled fibers, which minimize water, chemicals, and carbon emissions.)<\/p>\n For her part, Choi hopes The New Norm can put a dent in the global plastics crisis, which has reached disastrous levels. The world produces 200 times as much plastic today as it did in 1950, less than 10% of which is recycled. There\u2019s an estimated 8bn tons of plastic pollution across the globe, and just three plastic chemicals cause as much as $1.5tn in annual health costs.<\/p>\n Cox said Choi was early in terms of thinking about how to transform plastic into textile. And while there are other companies that turn plastic and textile waste into yarn, Cox said Choi\u2019s focus on the party cup was unique, especially because of where it could lead. \u201cFood containers, food packaging, that\u2019s something that we don\u2019t think about,\u201d she said. \u201cEveryone throws it out daily, and there haven\u2019t been many solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n Some might question if we really want to be wearing clothes made out of plastic, but the reality is we already are. More than 60% of fibers produced worldwide are synthetic, the vast majority of which are derived from virgin fossil fuels, according to a 2024 report from Textile Exchange, making the fashion industry a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Cox and Choi both acknowledged how much needs to be done to reduce plastic usage, but see upcycling as an important first step.<\/p>\n \u201cIt would be amazing if we lived in a plastic-free world,\u201d Choi said. \u201cBut if you look at the volume of virgin, synthetic fibers made annually, we\u2019re talking billions of tons of material. There\u2019s a long road to go.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019ve been on a college campus in the last 30 years, you\u2019ve likely come across red party cups. Made by brands like Solo and Hefty, the iconic cups are beloved by frats, crucial to drinking games like beer pong \u2013 and very difficult to recycle because of the type of plastic they\u2019re made from.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21697,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[13306,7228,7282,4510,2419,1411,298,393,3596,4771,13307,2131,9464],"class_list":{"0":"post-21696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-cups","9":"tag-engineering","10":"tag-error","11":"tag-fashion","12":"tag-lot","13":"tag-red","14":"tag-solo","15":"tag-student","16":"tag-stylish","17":"tag-sustainable","18":"tag-sweaters","19":"tag-trial","20":"tag-turned"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}