Watch a group of college students play beer pong, and you’ll notice the revolving use of plastic party cups they leave in their wake.
Lauren Choi certainly noticed, and as an engineering student at Johns Hopkins University, decided to do something about it.
These party cups — most often created by the brands Solo and Hefty — are very difficult to recycle due to the type of plastic they are made with. Instead of completely breaking them down, Choi wondered if the cups could be spun into a kind of fabric.
During her senior year in 2019, she created an extruder machine that spun plastic waste into textile filaments. With the help of campus fraternities, she and her team gathered thousands of red cups to refine the process.
“College students use a lot of party cups. We probably knew that already, but to prove it, we launched a pilot collection program on the Johns Hopkins campus during my senior year (right before the pandemic),” Choi told Brené Brown in an interview.
“We onboarded six student clubs and were collecting 5,000-plus cups a month. Johns Hopkins has an undergraduate population of around 6,000. We got immense support from the student community, and it’s been inspiring to see how excited people are about recycling and sustainability.”
All of this led to The New Norm, Choi’s textile company that now makes 3D-knitted sweaters and beanies out of these plastic cups.
The company’s first direct-to-consumer collection, released in late 2023, was made from 5,000 upcycled party cups collected by frats. The drop sold out in two months.
Choi recently told The Guardian she has long been concerned about the plastics crisis, as well as the fashion industry’s impact on the planet.
“I’ve always thought long-term. 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,” Choi said. “[The New Norm] really tied my interests together.”
After she graduated, Choi dove headfirst into The New Norm, applying for grant funding for product development and working with suppliers that source plastic from recycling facilities across the United States.
But the mix of plastics was yielding unstable results. Plus, the fabric coming from the extruder still didn’t feel as soft and comfortable as a sweater should.
“If you’re going to produce a knit garment, it needs to be comfortable,” Jasmine Cox, Gaston College’s Textile Technology Center, told The Guardian.
“It needs to be breathable, cozy, things that people love. It can’t feel like a plastic cup.”
Choi enlisted the help of Cox and the Textile Technology Center, as well as the Polymers Center, both in North Carolina. They helped her develop a custom formula that would produce soft textiles from the extruders, achieving what Choi called “plug and play.”
Now, they’ve finally streamlined the process.
With some assistance from grant funding (which came from big names like Johns Hopkins, Garnier, and even Hefty’s parent company, Reynolds Consumer Products), The New Norm has an online store where beanies and sweaters are available for purchase, ranging from $45 to $85.
The “plug and play” process is an intriguing one. The company works with textile facilities in North Carolina and Virginia to extrude the plastic-based yarn, which is shipped to Brooklyn. Here, manufacturers utilize 3D knitting to produce the garments.
“3D knitting is similar to 3D printing but for apparel. Our sweaters and beanies are knit straight out of the machine without any sewing,” The New Norm’s website explains.
“Traditional industrial cut-and-sew can waste over 30% of the fabric used. Additionally, our garments are made on demand. When you click purchase, your garment starts knitting. This means no wasted inventory.”
This process also means there are little to no microplastics shed from the garments, even though the raw material in each garment is plastic.
“To combat fiber shedding and microplastic pollution, we are only producing filament yarns. Filament yarns are made from continuous filaments, not individual fibers,” The New Norm details.
“The majority of apparel is made from staple (spun) yarns, which are created by spinning staple fibers together into a yarn. When a garment is put into the laundry machine, these staple fibers shed easily and enter the water stream.”
The company now uses a myriad of plastics in its production, but the main base remains multicolored party cups. Because the cups often come in bright colors like pink, blue, green, or red, the colors of the final product typically do not require any added dyes. The New Norm’s website also shares that no water is used in the production process.
Choi is now living in Boston as an MBA student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but she said The New Norm is just getting started.
Over the last two years, she told The Guardian, production has expanded from tens of pounds of plastic per run to thousands of pounds.
“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.
She dreams of integrating plastics like food containers and packaging into the production line, similar to the party cup’s process.
Although a lean venture right now, Choi knows there’s a long, if not impossible, road to a totally plastic-free world. But at least with The New Norm, she hopes to make a dent.
“Addressing challenges like climate change is overwhelming. These are global issues caused by numerous interconnected industries. The problems are ingrained in decades-old systems and have an impact on all parts of our environment. It sometimes feels like one person can’t make a significant difference,” she told Brené Brown.
“I’d say to anyone thinking about making a positive impact that you’re not alone — you’re just joining the team.”
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Header image courtesy of Laura LaRose (CC BY 2.0)
