This College Student Was Tired Of Seeing Red Solo Cups Litter Her Campus. She Invented A Way To Turn Them Into Sweaters

This College Student Was Tired Of Seeing Red Solo Cups Litter Her Campus. She Invented A Way To Turn Them Into Sweaters

This College Student Was Tired Of Seeing Red Solo Cups Litter Her Campus. She Invented A Way To Turn Them Into Sweaters Watch a group of college students play beer pong, and you’ll notice the revolving use of plastic party cups they leave in their wake.  Lauren Choi certainly noticed, and as an engineering student at Johns Hopkins University, decided to do something about it. These party cups — most often created by the brands Solo and Hefty — are very difficult to recycle due to the type of plastic they are made with. Instead of completely breaking them down, Choi wondered if the cups could be spun into a kind of fabric. Lauren Choi. Photo courtesy of The New Norm During her senior year in 2019, she created an extruder machine that spun plastic waste into textile filaments. With the help of campus fraternities, she and her team gathered thousands of red cups to refine the process. “College students use a lot of party cups. We probably knew that already, but to prove it, we launched a pilot…