With so much pollution around, turning plastic into building materials can be a useful idea to save environment and Atlas Building Composites, a spinout of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did the same. Addressing two problems with a single solution, the company successfully developed an AI-powered robotic manufacturing platform capable of turning single-use plastics into durable building materials, reports MIT News.
The company was born out of MIT HAUS, a research effort in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering that’s short for “Home Architecture for Universal Sustainability.” How does Atlas work? Atlas combines waterless plastic recycling with large-scale composite 3D printing to create building components such as home foundations, decks, and structural trusses for walls, floors, and roofs. Today, each Atlas factory cell is capable of producing the structural framing components for about one small home per day.
Perez and Atlas co-founder Matt Pouliot aim to deploy thousands of their AI-powered robotic production systems worldwide. A major factor behind this vision is Atlas’ ability to turn low-grade plastic waste into building components without using water.
“Our mission is to convert waste plastic pollution into durable composites to build 1 billion homes,” Atlas chair and co-founder A.J. Perez ’13, MNG ’14, PhD ’23, who is also an MIT research scientist, told MIT News. “You can’t divorce these things from each other. We’re not here just to build homes, and we’re not here just to recycle plastic. The conventional way of building homes involves cutting down trees, mining, refining, and a bunch of other dirty activities. We want to avoid all that and address all the plastic bound for our oceans and landfills. We’re turning bottles into buildings.”
The researchers are using Atlas' parts to support barns, sheds, decks, and docks. “This is key to democratizing recycling,” Perez says. “Now, every country around the world, regardless of their water access, will be able to do something about their plastic.”
What is striking is that the company has also supplied the US Army Corps of Engineers with American-made recycled composite trusses to construct a 40-foot bridge in a Massachusetts wetland.
How plastic bottles are turned into homes, bridges
The process begins with single-use plastic from water bottles and other products. The plastic is shredded, fed into the Atlas system, melted and fused with American-made fiberglass, creating a material designed to be stronger than wood. A large-scale 3D printer then uses the material to manufacture components such as trusses for floors, walls, roofs and bridges.
