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.
After graduating in 2020, Choi raised grant funding so she could dive more into product development. “That helped it go from a passion project to a real, real project,” she said.
Choi started working with suppliers who source plastics from recycling facilities across the country. “Recycled [materials are] still the wild west,” she said. “We received batches that were unusable or contaminated or too mixed. It was a lot of trial and error to find the right people.”
Another challenge: Up until that point, the fabric coming out of the extruder still had a distinctly brittle, plastic feel – it didn’t feel wearable like a traditional textile. So Choi reached out to Gaston College’s Textile Technology Center, just outside Charlotte, North Carolina, for help.
“If you’re going to produce a knit garment, it needs to be comfortable,” said Jasmine Cox, the center’s executive director. “It needs to be breathable, cozy, things that people love. It can’t feel like a plastic cup.”
Cox’s 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. “Our entire goal [was] to get her to that point where it was plug and play,” Cox said.
It took them a couple years, and more grant funding (from Johns Hopkins, Garnier, and Reynolds Consumer Products, Hefty’s 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.
Choi works with textile facilities in North Carolina and Virginia to produce The New Norm’s 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.
“3D knitting has a lot less waste compared to traditional cut-and-sew, where many fabric scraps are wasted,” Choi said. “Instead, our pieces are knit straight out of the machine without any seams – it’s just one full garment that doesn’t need additional sewing.”
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’ 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’s less likely to shed harmful microplastics.
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.
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.
“From 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,” 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.
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 “sustainable” is somewhat nebulous, most research defines it as textiles made with eco-friendly material, including recycled fibers, which minimize water, chemicals, and carbon emissions.)
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’s 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.
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’s focus on the party cup was unique, especially because of where it could lead. “Food containers, food packaging, that’s something that we don’t think about,” she said. “Everyone throws it out daily, and there haven’t been many solutions.”
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.
“It would be amazing if we lived in a plastic-free world,” Choi said. “But if you look at the volume of virgin, synthetic fibers made annually, we’re talking billions of tons of material. There’s a long road to go.”
