How an engineering student turned red Solo cups into stylish sweaters: ‘A lot of trial and error’ | Sustainable fashion

When you’ve been on a university campus within the final 30 years, you’ve probably come throughout purple celebration cups. Made by manufacturers like Solo and Hefty, the long-lasting cups are beloved by frats, essential to consuming video games like beer pong – and really tough to recycle due to the kind of plastic they’re constructed from.However Lauren Choi, an engineering scholar at Johns Hopkins College, noticed a possibility: she wished to show these problematic cups into material. In 2019, throughout her senior 12 months, she led a group that constructed an extruder machine that might spin plastic waste into textile filaments. They partnered with campus fraternities to assemble hundreds of purple cups that might function the uncooked materials.Choi then took a weaving class at a Baltimore, Maryland, maker house so she might make a pattern material out of these filaments. That turned the muse for The New Norm, a textile firm that right now transforms quite a lot of post-consumer recycled plastic into trendy sweatshirts and beanies.“I’ve at all times thought long-term,” Choi stated. “And that helps me look past the following couple years, [to the] greater image, the place globally, [the plastic crisis] is one thing we have to tackle.”The corporate is a pure extension of Choi’s longstanding concern concerning the twin local weather and plastics crises and a deep connection to trend. She had been stitching since she was a baby, interned at a swimwear firm earlier in school, and – earlier than teaming up with classmates – spent a summer season making an attempt to construct an extruder machine in her mother and father’ storage. “[The New Norm] actually tied my pursuits collectively,” she stated.After graduating in 2020, Choi raised grant funding so she might dive extra into product improvement. “That helped it go from a ardour venture to an actual, actual venture,” she stated. Isabelle Callaghan, Alicia Furlan, Lauren Choi, and Camille Afable pose for portraits within the celebration sweater made out of recycled plastic in Boston, Massachusetts, on 13 September 2025. {Photograph}: Religion Ninivaggi/The GuardianChoi began working with suppliers who supply plastics from recycling services throughout the nation. “Recycled [materials are] nonetheless the wild west,” she stated. “We acquired batches that had been unusable or contaminated or too blended. It was quite a lot of trial and error to search out the fitting individuals.”One other problem: Up till that time, the material popping out of the extruder nonetheless had a distinctly brittle, plastic really feel – it didn’t really feel wearable like a conventional textile. So Choi reached out to Gaston Faculty’s Textile Know-how Heart, simply exterior Charlotte, North Carolina, for assist.“When you’re going to provide a knit garment, it must be comfy,” stated Jasmine Cox, the middle’s govt director. “It must be breathable, cozy, issues that individuals love. It will possibly’t really feel like a plastic cup.”Cox’s group, together with individuals on the Polymers Heart in North Carolina, helped Choi develop a customized system that could possibly be fed into extruders to provide gentle textiles. “Our whole aim [was] to get her to that time the place it was plug and play,” Cox stated.It took them a pair years, and extra grant funding (from Johns Hopkins, Garnier, and Reynolds Shopper Merchandise, Hefty’s mum or dad firm, amongst others), to get to that time. The New Norm launched its first, direct-to-consumer assortment of sweaters and beanies in late 2023. Created from 5,000 upcycled celebration cups, the drop offered out in two months.Choi works with textile services in North Carolina and Virginia to provide The New Norm’s yarn, a lot of which is then shipped to Brooklyn, the place a producer makes use of 3D printers to provide sweatshirts and beanies, which retail between $45 and $85.“3D knitting has quite a bit much less waste in comparison with conventional cut-and-sew, the place many material scraps are wasted,” Choi stated. “As an alternative, our items are knit straight out of the machine with none seams – it’s only one full garment that doesn’t want further stitching.” Alicia Furlan and Camille Afable mannequin the celebration sweaters and celebration beanie made out of recycled plastics by The New Norm. {Photograph}: Religion Ninivaggi/The GuardianEven although the corporate now makes use of quite a lot of plastics, multicolored celebration cups nonetheless make up a lot of the uncooked supplies in its personal line. The objects’ pink, blue and inexperienced pastel hues come from the cups themselves fairly than added dyes. Choi stated her yarn is constructed from steady filaments, fairly than fibers which can be spun collectively, which implies it’s much less prone to shed dangerous microplastics.The New Norm remains to be a lean operation: Choi, who not too long ago moved to Boston to pursue an MBA on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, stated at any given time there are between three and 25 individuals working on the firm. She declined to share gross sales figures, however stated that within the final two years manufacturing had expanded from tens of kilos per run to hundreds.Choi stated she goals to increase the business-to-business aspect of The New Norm, which she sees as providing the most important alternative for an environmental influence.“From the start, our aim has been to get to a spot the place we are able to scale manufacturing and work with actually massive manufacturers who’re utilizing vital portions of supplies,” she stated. The New Norm is present process pilots with massive manufacturers, testing every little thing from the energy of the yarn to how effectively it launders, with the aim of creating and promoting the fabric at a a lot bigger scale.This aligns with the place some specialists see the business going, as a rising variety of firms rethink the place they supply their uncooked supplies. One report discovered that the sustainable textile market was valued globally at $29.5bn in 2024, and is anticipated to hit $71bn by 2031. (Whereas what constitutes “sustainable” is considerably nebulous, most analysis defines it as textiles made with eco-friendly materials, together with recycled fibers, which decrease water, chemical substances, and carbon emissions.)For her half, Choi hopes The New Norm can put a dent within the world plastics disaster, which has reached disastrous ranges. The world produces 200 occasions as a lot plastic right now because it did in 1950, lower than 10% of which is recycled. There’s an estimated 8bn tons of plastic air pollution throughout the globe, and simply three plastic chemical substances trigger as a lot as $1.5tn in annual well being prices.Cox stated Choi was early by way of enthusiastic about learn how to remodel plastic into textile. And whereas there are different firms that flip plastic and textile waste into yarn, Cox stated Choi’s concentrate on the celebration cup was distinctive, particularly due to the place it could lead on. “Meals containers, meals packaging, that’s one thing that we don’t take into consideration,” she stated. “Everybody throws it out day by day, and there haven’t been many options.”Some would possibly query if we actually wish to be sporting garments made out of plastic, however the actuality is we already are. Greater than 60% of fibers produced worldwide are artificial, the overwhelming majority of that are derived from virgin fossil fuels, in accordance with a 2024 report from Textile Change, making the style business a significant contributor to greenhouse gasoline emissions. Cox and Choi each acknowledged how a lot must be completed to scale back plastic utilization, however see upcycling as an vital first step.“It might be wonderful if we lived in a plastic-free world,” Choi stated. “However should you take a look at the amount of virgin, artificial fibers made yearly, we’re speaking billions of tons of fabric. There’s a protracted street to go.”