by DEBBIE SPEER

TRASHY TREASURE: Rewilder founders Jennifer Silbert and Stephanie Choi have taken their passion for repurposing common trash into objets d’art and and applied it to used and unsold T-shirts, concert banners, and stage scrims to create fashion like the tote bags shown here. (Courtesy Rewilder)

Stephanie Choi, co-founder of upcycling company Rewilder, grew up in Pasadena and remembers playing in piles of discarded fabric when her parents were garment manufacturers.

“I grew up playing in piles of rags that were discarded, and that burned an image in my head of this mountain of stuff that would eventually disappear, and wondering where that would go?”

Choi, a first-generation Chinese American, turned that memory into a career in zero-waste design and advises some of the world’s biggest brands with her background in science, research, marketing and storytelling. Among her company’s clients are Cali Vibes, the roots and reggae festival at Marina Green Park in Long Beach, California, and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

Along with business partner Jennifer Silbert, a sustainable design entrepreneur who has a self-described “passion for Dumpster diving,” the pair founded Rewilder, a company whose mission is to “make upcycling scalable” by partnering with industrial companies and others to identify, divert and upcycle waste materials “worthy of a second life.”

“My favorite thing to do is to really get more out of what already exists, and that kind of permeates a lot of my daily life,” Silbert says. “I’ve been doing it since middle school and now I’m bringing that back to Rewilder because it’s trendy again. I love that. Stephanie and I often joke about how we have this passion for trash.”

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