Lauren Choi's The New Norm Upcycles Red Solo Cups into Sustainable Textiles
Lauren Choi, a Johns Hopkins engineering student, founded The New Norm, a company dedicated to upcycling discarded red Solo cups into textile yarn and garments. In 2019, Choi and her team built an extruder capable of spinning plastic waste into textile filaments, collecting thousands of cups through campus fraternity drives.
After graduating in 2020, Choi obtained grants from Johns Hopkins, Garnier, Reynolds Consumer Products, and Hefty’s parent company to support the project. The company's direct-to-consumer collection launched in late 2023 utilized about 5,000 recycled cups and sold out within two months.
The New Norm worked with Gaston College's Textile Technology Center and the Polymers Center in North Carolina to develop a comfortable, wearable textile formula suitable for the extruded material. Production involves creating yarn in North Carolina and Virginia, while a Brooklyn-based manufacturer employs 3D knitting technology to produce seamless sweatshirts and beanies, priced between $45 and $85. This method reduces waste by knitting garments directly from the machine without seams.
The New Norm aims to scale its operations through partnerships with large brands and pilot projects to test the strength and laundering capabilities of their materials for widespread use.
The sustainable textile market, valued at $29.5 billion in 2024, is expected to reach $71 billion by 2031. This initiative responds to the global plastic crisis: production today is about 200 times higher than in 1950, with less than 10% recycled. Approximately 8 billion tons of plastic pollution exist worldwide, leading to up to $1.5 trillion in annual health costs related to plastic-related chemicals.
Choi has since moved to Boston to pursue an MBA at MIT. The New Norm remains a lean operation, employing between three and 25 people.
