Lauren Choi wanted to give plastic a second life. Her experiment turned into The New Norm, a sustainable textile startup

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.