How an engineering student turned red Solo cups into stylish sweaters: 'A lot of trial and error'
If you’ve been on a college campus in the last 30 years, you’ve 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 – and very difficult to recycle because of the type of plastic they’re made from.
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.
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.
“I’ve always thought long-term,” Choi said. “And that helps me look beyond the next couple years, [to the] bigger picture, where globally, [the plastic crisis] is something we need to address.”
The company is a natural extension of Choi’s 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 – before teaming up with classmates – spent a summer trying to build an extruder machine in her parents’ garage. “[The New Norm] really tied my interests together,” she said.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/sep/16/the-new-norm-sustainable-textiles-lauren-choi
I wish they'd also sell the yarn, because I'd like to knit my own.