Late-night beer pong and flip cup sessions inspire many seemingly brilliant business ideas, but most don't hold up in the cold, hungover light of day.
One Johns Hopkins engineering student, however, saw potential in the red plastic cups from those party games (besides holding room-temp brewskis).
Tapping into her potential
Lauren Choi, founder of sustainable fashion company The New Norm, developed a way to convert those difficult-to-recycle cups into sweaters and beanies.
During her senior year at Johns Hopkins University, Choi invented a way to transform frat lawn trash into stylish clothing, per The Guardian.
- Her team gathered thousands of cups from fraternities and fed them through a custom-built extruder.
- Choi took a weaving class to turn the raw materials into sample fabrics.
- After graduation, she secured grants from Johns Hopkins, Garnier, and Reynolds Consumer Products (cup-maker Hefty’s parent company) to develop the product.
The problem? Choi’s plastic-cup-based material still felt a whole lot like plastic cups — not cozy.
It took an improved formula to create softer material, and now the company's yarn is produced in North Carolina and shipped to Brooklyn, where 3D printers knit the material into clothing.
The New Norm's first collection, made from 5k cups, sold out in two months, with beanies retailing for $45 and sweaters starting at $85.
Hold the microplastics
While other companies turn plastic waste intoT-shirts, shoes, and even spacesuits, washing recycled polyester sheds significantly more microplastics than virgin polyester.
The New Norm, however, found creative solutions to common industry challenges:
- It uses continuous filaments instead of the short fibers used in most polyester so fewer loose ends break away, minimizing microplastic shed.
- The company's manufacturing uses no water, and 3D knitting products eliminates the waste of traditional cut-and-sew textiles.
- The clothing's pastel shades come from the colors of recycled cups rather than added dyes.
The global sustainable fabrics market was valued at $29m in 2024 \and projected to reach $71m by 2031.
And Choi’s company has scaled production from tens of pounds of plastic per run to thousands in the past two years.
I'll drink to that.
