From Waste to Wearable - Recycling Plastic Into Sustainable Clothing

Hello and welcome to the Conscious Design Podcast. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and I help turn product ideas into sustainable 7-figure businesses. Join me for another episode where sustainability meets innovation and business savvy. Today, I'm excited to have Lauren here. She's the founder of New Norm Fabric, where they're transforming party cups and ocean plastics into sustainable fabric. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

Absolutely. Well, everybody loves a good origin story. So before we dive into everything, let's start with what got you into having the idea, I want to turn some plastic from the ocean and some party cups into a usable material. Yeah.

So at the time, around 5 years ago, I was studying materials engineering at Johns Hopkins. And I feel like there were kind of 2 major things happening at the time. And there were so many articles kind of coming out about these huge problems, one being plastic pollution. It kind of came to light at the time that we don't recycle most of our waste here in the US. We ship our waste overseas, we landfill it, we incinerate it. And as someone who went to college being really passionate about sustainability, and someone who was like rinsing out my milk carton to recycle it, to find out that most of what we put in the blue bin isn't actually recycled, that was like actually truly shocking to me. That like really stuck with me. And then at the same time, fashion, people were realizing how polluting it is as a global industry. It is the second largest polluting after oil and gas, which many people did not realize, but it is such an interconnected global industry that impacts our land, our water, our air, people. And so for me, it was those 2 issues that kind of led me to a summer working in my garage. I was like, okay, I'm going to build a small little extruder machine to recycle plastic. into a sustainable yarn and kind of had done some research, read some papers and some textbooks on this kind of concept, which was being done, but I was like, I'm going to take it into my own hands and try it myself. That did not work at all for the first couple of months. Yeah, completely.

You're taking on building an extruder machine. That is something most people don't even think of trying to go for.

Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like not working is a good result anyway. Like, that's, it's a hard thing to build.

No, definitely a hard thing to build. And I do look back, especially at the early days, and now, like people say, being a younger founder, lack of experience might actually be the reason you decide to try something because as you go through it, you realize, wait a minute, this is really difficult. Quickly realized that, but kind of kept tinkering and After the summer, it was like, okay, you know what? I'm not going to leave it at home. I'm going to take it back to school with me and fixed it up, kind of assembled a team of mechanical engineering students, environmental engineering students, materials as well. And being back, I mean, there are just party cups everywhere. Like every social event, party gathering, you name it, you see those classic cups. There. And yeah, that's what inspired it. We were using a smoothie blender at the time to shred up the cups. So stuck one in there, processed it with the extruder, and we finally got it to work, which was really exciting. So yeah, that first 6 months is really kind of when I started to found The New Norm.

That's awesome. Well, I love that it started with building a plastic extruder in your garage and a blender. Like, that's a pretty—

Yeah, we got very creative. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Honestly, we're definitely, we're like piecing together anything we could use to like make this work. So yeah.

Well, that's great. I mean, I think that's, it's a lot of people think you have to like build a perfect working prototype machine and it has to be like perfect the first time. And it's, It's always good to remind people when talking to people like you who've actually done it, like, no, it started out ugly. It wasn't perfect. There's failures along the way. And yes, sometimes you use a blender because it works. It works. It works. That's the thing. Yeah.

No, I definitely, I feel like each year I've done this, I've relearned that conclusion exactly that this is an iterative process. People talk about that. You know, you test out a hypothesis, you try something new, you see if it works. If it doesn't work, you try something else. And I think that has never gone away, even as like we've had successes and we've scaled, we're still testing new variables, which puts us in that kind of like circular mindset always. And there is just always failure with research and development and product design and development and scaling. Yeah. All of those things. So it is not— Not a linear path, that's for sure.

Yeah, it doesn't fit in a nice neat box. It is, it is a road you don't know where it's going yet until you are standing there and then you go, oh yeah, there we go. Yeah, there was a bend. We figured it out.

Yeah. Well, yeah.

All right, so you started there. Now it's been, it's been 5 years and you are obviously, you have The fabric, you, I believe it's mostly knit, a knitted knitting material, correct? Where, I guess let's talk about that. How did we go from garage and blender to you're obviously in production, right? You can, I can buy it right now. I can buy the material. How was that journey getting there?

Yeah, I mean, it took a long time. So as I graduated, I kind of set a goal for myself and I always try to tell undergraduate students and grad students as well, like, There are so many grant opportunities for student entrepreneurs. And I think while I was at school, didn't really realize that towards the end of my 4 years, I was like, oh my God, this is how we can start to pursue formal product development and lab testing. So set a goal for myself. I said, hey, you know, if I'm able to raise enough grant funding to do this by graduation, I will reach out to the polymer and textile labs that I've been wanting to work with and give this a go. 5 days before graduation, hit that goal, immediately launched working with a couple labs, and we essentially started again from ground zero. The extruder I built went back into the garage and it's been there ever since. There are larger-scale industrial equipment that we can do this on, and the challenge really became a materials engineering and process development challenge. And so, Speaking of things not looking pretty the first time around, bunch of failed trials did not go well, had to figure things out and problem solve. And I would say that really took probably the first year or 2 out of school. One thing I like to share is that like I worked a full-time job my first year out of school and did this on the side, which I think there's a bit of a stereotype of what a typical founder might look like in a startup. But I think now that I've been through this and know so many other founders, like everyone's journey looks a little different. And so many people start their startup while they have a full-time job and it's more of a passion project on the side. And so really was able to do that. I was working in biotech, which is, you know, a totally different industry, but learned so much there that I was able to apply to textiles and recycling. And then we, along the way, just found really great manufacturing partners. And I would say without those partnerships, like, we would not have been able to scale to where we are today. So found a really good recycling partner, yarn extruder, fabric knitting partners as well. And now we've gone all the way to the final garment, which is really exciting and also just like validates the technology behind all of this. But yeah, it took a while to get there and a lot of collaboration, I would say.

Yeah, it's— collaboration is so important. I think it's skipped over a little bit when you're like, oh, the solo entrepreneur, like you can just do it, but it's much easier if you have the support and the collaboration to get there.

Yeah.

With the material, so you mentioned, you know, starting with cups and things like that. How do you source and what's your recycling? Are you really specific in that you go You only are collecting certain materials. How do you go about the material side? That's the hard part. How do you go about that on the sourcing side?

Yeah, people, I think, don't realize that like collection itself and then sorting are some of the biggest barriers to large-scale recycling. So in the US here, like typically one truck comes around, you put all of your paper, cardboard, plastic, metal into the blue bin. And then all of that goes into one truck with everyone else's recyclables, and then that becomes really difficult to sort. So yes, collection, material sourcing, huge issue. When we started, we learned that also quickly by doing it ourselves. We did a party cup collection program on the Johns Hopkins campus, worked with the fraternities, gave them each this like big red trash can to collect their cups. So definitely in a few months got that hands-on experience of like, wow, this is really challenging. So now we work with suppliers to do that. We are targeting like hard-to-recycle materials. So the number 5s, number 6s that are not being recycled in our existing infrastructure. So party cups fall into that category. We work with a couple different ocean plastics, but yes, collection now, sorting, Shredding, all of that is done with our partners. And then we kind of take it from there and apply our technology in order to turn it into a fiber.

Got it. So you're, so you're focused on those harder, really hard to recycle plastics, then you're not taking the easy, the easy to recycle materials. Your process is really for those hard, what would be basically unrecyclable typically.

Yeah. And a lot of plastics are recyclable, but it's the lack of those like solutions and technologies out there to handle all of the different types. So typically, I mean, in places that have recycling infrastructure, like the number 1s and number 2s might be like being turned into a new product. But yeah, the further you go up in the numbers, 3, 4, 5, 6, and beyond, it just, there are just less solutions out there.

Right. And you mentioned ocean. I was talking to someone else about this because they ran into— and I'm curious if you ran into this as well— getting ocean plastics but having issues with the different levels of ocean. Because there's like, oh, it's been in the ocean for like 15 years, and that is way different than, oh, it's been in there for a month.

Mm-hmm.

And so they started to have some issues and they had to segregate out Which basically how much saltwater had eroded into their plastic to handle with them. Is that something that I'm assuming your supplier handles that? But have you, does that impact you at all? Or did you run into that when you were initially proving out your technology?

Yeah, no, that's interesting. Like length, like duration being in the water. I think within the world of ocean plastics, because it's such a new Like segment of plastics that people are trying to collect. We've seen a lot more in the, like, defining what is ocean plastic. Like, I think sometimes people don't realize, like, if you're close to the shoreline, very different than collecting plastic than is like out deep miles into the ocean. And so I think we've seen with our suppliers, like, ease of collection definitely closer to the shoreline. A lot easier. Sometimes ocean plastic gets defined by like, if you have a river going into the ocean, they're able to kind of like collect it as it like is about to enter the bigger body of water. I will say I would really probably question folks that are saying that they're collecting plastics miles and miles out in the deep, deep ocean. I think that is still where we lack the people doing that kind of work, the funding to do that kind of work. It's just so much harder to get to.

Yeah.

But yeah, I think this is a really new space as of like now, like even 5 years ago, I don't think they had these definitions for what is ocean plastic. So yeah, I think the space has a long way to go. I think now there's some certifications, people have questions about certifications in that world. But yeah, definitely needs more progress to be made moving forward.

Yeah, well, I didn't realize You mentioned if it's in the river going to the ocean, that that could be— because it sounds like it should be from—

Yeah, that's like ocean-bound plastic. So now the term is ocean-bound. So now there are kind of different words and vocabulary that I think is going to help with transparency around this topic.

Yeah, that's good. I think some clarity would be good as those get better defined as to what What it actually is. Yeah. With your, let's talk about your material and what you can use it for. So, right, everybody's familiar with other polyesters and things like that that are common fabric materials. What does yours fall under? Because it's not usually recycled plastic, right? This is hard to recycle. So where do you fall and how does it compare to what I guess normal people would be used to.

Yeah, so it is a, I mean, a synthetic material. It's derived from polymers, as is polyester, nylon, spandex, which are more commonly known. This, for a specific segment of our materials, are being used in textiles. They're just far less common in apparel. So polypropylene being one of them, you'll see that in automotive and home furnishing, but also some high-performance athletic wear. But yeah, it's definitely a category that folks are less familiar with. But in terms of like performance and testing we do, we are trying to mimic virgin polyester, virgin synthetic materials. So that's kind of our benchmark, but we're hoping to do it with recycled content.

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Right.

Your products, right, you have more knitted and things like that. Is this a material— because you mentioned more You know, like automotive, you don't see many knitted automotive seats out there. Is this something that you're able to, like, are you planning on being able to produce other materials with it? Or because of how you're recycling, is more, is this kind of what you can get out of it?

Yeah, no, good question. I would say, so the reason we did knit garments, well, a couple of reasons. One, we found A 3D knitting partner, which is something I've been kind of keeping my eye on for a couple of years, like the concept of 3D knitting.

Yeah, for those who—

it's not popular. Yeah, it's both been around for a while and not. Like most garments are cut and sewn together. So you're taking a yard of fabric, you're cutting it, sewing it together. There's a lot of waste that comes off of the side of it. Because if you imagine like a t-shirt, like That is not a square shape by any means. You know, you have armholes and necklines and yeah, exactly. And people have different sizes and fits. So a lot of fabric gets wasted during that process. In 3D knitting, the whole garment is coming out in a finished form. So you don't have to do any sewing afterwards. It's like hard to visualize. We have a video on our website, but like both panels are coming out of the machine. At the same time. And there are no seams. So that, I mean, finding that partner was very cool. And they do knit garments. I would say when it comes to our materials, like we can go into other end use cases because it's really a matter of like how you use the yarn. So the same yarn can go into a knit product, but if someone needed to create like a woven product or something else, that same yarn could then be— woven or manipulated in a different way to create a different end product. So yeah, for us, we wanted to launch this capsule last year kind of as like a really exciting end to a strategic partnership we had. And so we decided to knit those products. Yeah.

Got it. What are, because you've worked with 3D sewing, knitting more, more than I have. What are kind of the limitations? Are there I mean, if it can make a t-shirt, that's pretty fairly complicated. Like it's usually 3, 4, or 5 pieces. What are, what can you do with it with your, obviously with material?

I would say, yeah, definitely 3D knitting has limitations. Like you couldn't create a suit with a 3D knitting machine. So I would say anything with like that, anything that typically uses a woven fabric, anything that has like a lot of structure. I mean, our partner can do like quite a few different like types of garments, like anything from sweatpants to a polo to a sweater. Things with like buttons have to be sewn on, zippers have to be sewn on. But like, I mean, it's pretty impressive. Can do everything? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then once again, like jeans, jeans are, you know, woven with cotton. That's not going to be 3D knit necessarily. So I would say things that Typically have some stretch can be done on a 3D knitting machine.

Very interesting. Very interesting. That's cool. That's really cool that that's coming along. I've heard of it, but it's just, yeah, it's not something most companies use. They use traditional for everything that they make. So that's cool that you've been able to find that. For you guys, right, you have, I know you have your final products now that you are selling, but You're more of a materials company, correct? You're— so are you more aimed at trying to get this material in the hands of other producers, or what's your— how's that? And how's that been going? 5 years, how is your— how's the reception? Have you had educate people? What's been your journey getting businesses to actually buy your brand new, brand new material and put it in their Yeah, so I would say, I mean, we got to that point pretty recently.

So we've, for background, like, have only raised grant funding and have been bootstrapped, which is, I have found, not super typical for hard tech companies. It's definitely harder to do because these trials are so costly. And so I would say our progress has definitely been a bit more organic than other startups. And so, we really focused on technical validation for like the first 3, 4 years. So, scaling from the lab to small pilot trials to pilot slash production scale. And so, I would say we're finally getting to the point where we can produce larger quantities, which is really exciting. And now, I would say is when like we are more confident in having conversations with I think those conversations all look really different. I think sustainability means something totally different to big brand versus a small brand. A small brand might want finished fabric. A really big brand might be like, hey, we knit our own fabric, so we want the yarn. So I think really depending on the end use case, what their like corporate goals are, our products kind of fit into different places. So yeah, those conversations are starting, which is super exciting. I think the fact that we were able to like create a finished garment ourselves, like kind of proved that we can make it all the way, which is exciting. So yeah, starting to have those conversations now.

Oh, that's great. That is definitely an interesting path. Most hardware companies usually try to get a large infusion of cash with investors. They don't get stuck with a grant that's too small. So I guess how, for people that might be curious about that, what was your process of going and making those grants actually be enough to get you there?

Yeah.

Because you have a final product, you have, you can bake, make anything for anybody from yarn all the way through a final product. That's quite the achievement just on some grants over over 5 years. How did you go about making it actually work?

Yeah, I would say like mindset-wise, we were like, we have always stayed really lean and really scrappy. So like, I think from like a product side and R&D side, knowing specifically like, what are the goals of this trial? Why are we doing this? We were not as good at that in the early days. Got a lot better at that in the past couple years. But yeah, I, I one didn't have a business background, did not also set out to be a founder when I was in school. And so this was all very much like learning as you know we moved forward. Started out within the kind of university ecosystem. There are so many business plan competitions, grant opportunities through that. I mean, Johns Hopkins Tech Ventures was a huge you know like. supporter, especially at the beginning. And so I would say that is how in the early days we raised grant funding through kind of those opportunities. But then, yeah, I just kept applying to grants out there. And I think part of it is doing some research, but also networking like with other founders, with other like accelerator groups, like getting to know the startup ecosystem. Really, really helpful for learning about opportunities. And then I would say also, like, writing grants, it's a lengthy process, it's a difficult process. But also, I think over time we got better at communicating, like, hey, these are our goals, this is what the funding is for. And then as soon as we receive that funding, we hit the ground running and we're ready to do exactly that. So I think we got much better at setting really, like, you know, ambitious, but also realistic goals and being ready to move quickly when we kind of got that funding. So yeah, no, but I have to say, I felt fundraising FOMO for every year that I've done this, having gone through like accelerator programs and you see people in your cohort going out and raising, you know, millions of dollars and you're like, wait a minute, is this this what I need to be doing right now with my time? In some cases, you really do, because like sometimes you need to build out things in the early days of running a startup. But I actually just went through an investor readiness bootcamp and walked out of this kind of month-long program being like, nope, we're— I don't think we're fundraising right now. I think we're going to keep bootstrapping it a bit longer. Because yeah, I mean, fundraising comes with all sorts of new challenges. You know, that becomes your role as a founder. You have To hit really ambitious metrics and milestones. And then you also have to continue to fundraise until you kind of get to your exit point. And so I think it's a much bigger, longer undertaking than I ever realized, especially when I was starting out. You know, fundraising is really like a 10-year minimum commitment to you and your investors and your company and stakeholders. So. Yeah. But once again, learned all of this on the fly. So learning as I go.

Hard to say. This sounds like another great case of not having the experience is probably what let you make the decision and go, oh, this is totally doable. Because there's, I think there's a lot of founders after the first time where they go, oh, nope, got to go get raised a ton of money. And then, and only if I get millions of dollars will I That's like their first test is if I can't raise a few million dollars and I won't, I won't do it at all.

Yeah.

And clearly you've made this work of, oh, you just go after grants, keep going after them and be able to do that. And a few years later, you're sitting here with the ability to produce a product. And same as everybody else, because other people spend years fundraising to maybe like 4 or 5 years later get some funding. So You've made this steady, consistent progress is just as valid a way to get there, obviously. Yeah. But not everybody thinks about it as an option.

Yeah. I really think like I, in reflection, also fell into that like, oh, like startups are supposed to do XYZ. And I just, the more founders I've met, the more mentors I've met, there is no supposed to, there are just like I mean, I think that like you grow a business in the way you want to grow your business and there are just different ways to do that for different people. So yeah. Yeah.

I think the way you put it, fundraising FOMO, that is really, that's, it's a thing you feel like. And even I, like I have a design firm, I have a service. I don't have a product. And even then when I was like a 2-year-old company, I was like, maybe I should go fundraise. Maybe I should, Because it just seemed like, oh, you started a company. Well, you should fundraise. Like that's, it's so, even though we both have just agreed, there's so many ways to do it, but sometimes there's that weird pressure to get there.

Yeah. No. And I recently got great advice. And as I, as I'm going to say this out loud, it's going to sound so obvious, but like, I was speaking with an investor and she was like, there's no ticking like clock on when you can fundraise. Like, if you are a 10, 20-year-old company and you have de-risked all of the early things and you are like a stable, good company, that is actually a way better investment than like the person with an idea who maybe has an MVP. And I was like, oh my God, like, duh, that like totally, that totally makes sense. Like, I would, you know, where would you put your money as a person in the company that's been around for a long time now needs that jet fuel to like scale in a big way or on the early stage idea. However, I do think in the last 10, 20 years, like people have forgotten, it's easy to forget that. So yeah, no, that just like really struck a chord with me the other week. I was like, oh, great, great point.

Yeah, I think there's a slide or something, but somebody drew, it's basically like this X and it's like early stage to To late stage and it's risk versus basically risk versus reward, right? Risk goes down, reward goes up. And there's, everybody has their different, where it crosses. Some people are, they're very happy to be in the risk, high risk area. They'll just put money, $50,000, $100,000, $1 million into startups all day long. That's what they do. And then there's other people that are like, well, until it's been around for 10, 15 years, proven record. I won't touch it. And it's, uh, find out where yours is too as a founder.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that's, uh, important to know, but yeah, it's, you don't really think about it, but it is a safe bet later. It is.

Yeah. It actually, it makes maybe more sense to fundraise later on than earlier. So yeah.

Well, looking forward a little bit, uh, before we wrap up, where's You have this material, you're able to recycle these hard-to-recycle materials. So great, check that. You can make a product. Where do you see this going? Is this something where you're going, okay, we got yarn, now let's see what else we can produce? Or are you focused on growing inside fashion? What's your vision to take this?

Yeah, I think, I mean, from a scaling standpoint, we are not quite at like commercial production scale. So I think we are still growing to that. But I do think we're at the point now where we are starting to look for brand partners who are willing to grow alongside us. From a technical standpoint, yes, built like ensuring that our supply chain is ready to grow with that. We're always testing new slight variations with our formulation or our process. So continuing to improve that. But yeah, I think if we could start working with bigger brand partners to kind of like start recycling the volume that's needed to have a significant environmental impact, that's really where we want to be headed, at least in the next year or 2. So yeah, I would say that's our goal right now.

Amazing. Well, yeah, it's, uh, it's great to have the idea and prove it. And then the next step is to use the idea. And make the impact that you actually want, that you actually want to be making in the world.

Yeah.

So it's an important step, important step to take.

Yeah, no, definitely. We're actually still going to continue our like direct-to-consumer line as well. It's going to continue to be like a small capsule each time, but yeah, no, I feel like it's just like getting that customer feedback when they actually like interact with the sweater or wear the beanie has been really, really great to see. And I think it really puts kind of like a face to the concept, which I feel like for a while people couldn't visualize. Like, what does like a recycled party cup look like in a sweater? Like people would ask like, is it itchy and scratchy? I'm like, well, we're not. One person asked like, are you cutting up the cups and weaving them? I was like, no, no, no, no, no. Where was that coming from?

Strips of plastic cup.

Strips of plastic. I'm like, I promise you don't have to wear strips of plastic. No. But yeah, I do think that finally the sweater and the beanie kind of shows like, hey, this is what it looks like in its final form. So different from the cup that it started as. But yeah, that's been really great. So.

I love that idea because it's, you can quickly get disconnected from the end customer if you're just kind of at the beginning almost, you're, you know, you're step 2 of a long supply chain. You lose that connection and you lose ability to get the feedback and hear from people. This is what they think, this is what they're reacting to it, and it limits how you're able to improve. I love this idea of we want to be the behind-the-scenes supplier and we'll make the material, but we'll also sell it directly to consumers and have not lose touch with what people think of the material. And it's a great way to test it out and prove.

Yeah.

You mentioned is show manufacturers like, hey, it's out here, you can buy. You can see what it's going to be in the end without having to buy a million pounds of it and run it through your machines. So you can just buy it, see if you like it, and if you do, make it yourself. Like, no one's going to be unhappy about that. Yeah.

Yeah.

Amazing. Well, this is, this is, uh, really great. And this is really great what you'll be able to do recycling these hard-to-recycle plastics. There's, there's so few uses for them right Right now. So it's nice to see you've tackled this problem and are at least almost there in full-scale production capability. So that's great to see. And yeah, I really appreciate you being on the show. Last little thing, for anybody that wants to have a beanie or hoodie or any of your products, where can people find you? What's the best place to find you guys? And just anything else you want to throw in there that we might have missed?

Yeah, so I mean, our website is thenewnormfabric.com. And we go into pretty like good detail about like kind of each step of our supply chain. So if you ever wanted to be like, okay, I wanted to learn a little bit more about 3D knitting or microfiber shedding, you know, we have some information there. And then if you're more of a visual learner, our social media at The New Norm fabric on Instagram and on TikTok. We have tried to create some like how it's made videos. So really showing each step of our process from recycling to yarn to fabric to garment, really trying to explain that. And something we have taken a little bit of a break from but are trying to reboot this fall. But yes, lots of videos on there of kind of like behind the scenes, like On the manufacturing floor, like this is how urine is made, which I feel like is sometimes, I'm a very visual person. I like to see how, you know, stuff is made. So yeah, feel free to check it out there.

Amazing. And for everyone, there'll be links in the description. And yeah, check out the videos. I love watching that. I've been doing product development for 20+ years and I still enjoy watching machinery of just seeing like, oh, this is how you make a water bottle. This is crazy to watch this at the speed it runs. This is insane.

Yep.

Like, yeah, I know exactly what's happening, but visually seeing it versus like the idea can just be, it's impressive.

What, what, what all you can do.

So amazing. Well, thanks so much. I really appreciate you being on the show.

Yeah, no, thank you again so much for having me.

And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design Podcast. If today's episode inspired you to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a sustainable, figure business, visit petermanfirm.com or click the link below. Your ideas have the power to change the world, and we're here to help make that happen. Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next episode.