How Upcycled Solo Cup Sweaters Are Turning Party Waste Into Sustainable Fashion

The New Norm launched its first collection of upcycled Solo cup sweaters in 2023, selling out 5,000 cups worth of clothing in two months.

Lauren Choi looked at thousands of red Solo cups littering her college campus and saw something nobody else did: the raw material for comfortable clothing. The Johns Hopkins engineering student built a machine that could transform those notorious party cups into wearable fabric, launching a company that’s now producing upcycled Solo cup sweaters and beanies that sold out in two months.

If you’ve been to any college party in the last three decades, you know these cups. They’re everywhere at frat houses, essential for beer pong, and a recycling nightmare because of the specific plastic they’re made from.

Living in Montreal, I see single-use plastics everywhere. Coffee cups, takeout containers, water bottles. We all know it’s a problem, but most of us toss them in the blue bin and hope for the best. Choi actually did something about it.

In 2019, during her senior year, Choi led a team that built an extruder machine to spin plastic waste into textile filaments. An extruder melts plastic and pushes it through tiny holes to create thread-like strands. They partnered with campus fraternities to collect thousands of red cups as their starting material.

Choi then took a weaving class at a Baltimore maker space to turn those filaments into actual fabric. That sample became the foundation for The New Norm, her textile company that now transforms various types of recycled plastic into clothing, including their signature upcycled Solo cup sweaters.

The company aligns perfectly with Choi’s lifelong interests. She’d been sewing since childhood and interned at a swimwear company during college. Before teaming up with classmates, she spent a summer trying to build an extruder in her parents’ garage.

See also: The Billie Eilish Upcycled Merch Program Saves 280,000 T-Shirts From Landfills

After graduating in 2020, Choi raised grant money to focus on product development. She started working with suppliers who source plastics from recycling facilities nationwide. But the recycled materials market is chaotic. Choi received batches that were unusable, contaminated, or too mixed to work with.

Another major hurdle: the fabric coming out of the extruder felt brittle and plastic-y. Nobody wants to wear a sweater that feels like a Solo cup. So Choi reached out to Gaston College’s Textile Technology Center in North Carolina for help.

Jasmine Cox, the center’s executive director, knew what needed to happen. A knit garment has to be comfortable, breathable, and cozy. It absolutely cannot feel like a plastic cup.

Cox’s team, along with experts at the Polymers Center in North Carolina, helped Choi develop a custom formula for soft textiles. It took a couple years and grant funding from Johns Hopkins, Garnier, and Reynolds Consumer Products to get there.

The New Norm released its first collection of upcycled Solo cup sweaters and beanies in late 2023. Made from 5,000 upcycled party cups, the entire drop sold out in two months.

Choi works with textile facilities in North Carolina and Virginia to produce yarn. Much of it ships to Brooklyn, where a manufacturer uses 3D printers to create sweatshirts and beanies that retail for $45 to $85.

The 3D knitting process creates less waste than traditional cut-and-sew manufacturing. Each piece comes out as one complete garment without seams, leaving no fabric scraps.

The company now uses various plastics, but multicoloured party cups still make up the bulk of the raw materials for its upcycled Solo cup sweater line. Those pastel colours? They come from the cups themselves, not added dyes. Choi says her yarn uses continuous filaments rather than spun fibers, making it less likely to shed microplastics.

Cox says Choi was among the first to think about transforming plastic into textiles. While other companies turn plastic waste into yarn, Choi’s focus on party cups is unique because of where it could lead. Food containers and packaging are things we throw out daily, with few reuse options.Both Cox and Choi acknowledge the significant work that remains to reduce plastic use. But they see upcycling as an important first step.

The success of upcycled Solo cup sweaters proves that sustainable fashion doesn’t have to sacrifice style or comfort. Choi’s journey from frustrated college student to entrepreneur shows how innovation can transform waste into something valuable. It would be amazing to live in a plastic-free world. But when you look at billions of tons of virgin synthetic fibers made annually, there’s a long road ahead. For now, turning party cups into cozy sweaters that people actually want to wear represents real progress.

If The New Norm can scale up and partner with major brands, we might finally see a dent in the mountains of plastic waste choking our planet. Sometimes the best solutions come from looking at trash and seeing possibilities instead of problems.