What is the New Norm for Sustainable Fashion?
Season 3: Episode 15
What is fast fashion and what are its impacts on our planet? How can design and business help solve this problem with our current waste stream? How do you define a climate entrepreneur?
Climate entrepreneur Lauren Choi joins Eric to share her challenges and best practices for starting a business dedicated to helping mitigate the worst of our climate crisis. She also discusses what it's like being a female founder in the climate start-up world telling the inspiring story of her company The New Norm. Lauren started The New Norm during her time as a student at John Hopkins in a business accelerator after seeing the incredible amount of red plastic cups strewn across campus. She was inspired to turn this waste stream into a positive - fabric for clothing.
The Drawdown Climate Solution Sector in this episode is centered on Health & Education.
Listen to this episode on: Spotify, Apple, Google and other places you get your podcastsAbout our guest
Lauren is the Founder & CEO of The New Norm, a startup recycling plastics into sustainable yarns and fabrics. The New Norm is the first to recycle the iconic red party cup into fabric. 7+ billion are used annually but they are not recycled in the US. As a student studying materials engineering at Johns Hopkins University, Lauren was inspired to tackle this issue. She built an extruder machine in her garage to recycle party cups from campus into yarn. Fast forward 4-5 years, The New Norm has scaled to pilot production, manufacturers fabric in the US, and is targeting a wide range of plastics (e.g. ocean plastics) that don't typically get recycled in the US. Lauren aims to scale her process and collaborate with sustainable apparel brands.
On the web
Resources in this episode
bbc.com/news/business-39337204
Drawdown solution(s)
Episode topic tags
sustainable fashion, fast fashion, entrepreneurship, upcycling, recycled plastic, circular design, business accelerator
Find more about how to teach climate design in your classroom at www.climatedesigners.org/edu
Music in this episode
Nature sound effect by bbc.co.uk – ©2023 BBC
Theme music by Casual Motive
Design Team
Consulting
Climate Design Assignments
At the end of each episode, we ask our guests what their ideal climate design project would be. They have four weeks with a class full of design students. We translated their response into a project brief that you can use for your class.
