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.
