The world needs more homes. The world also has too much plastic. Perhaps the only thing those two problems have in common is that they're hard to solve.
Atlas Building Composites, a spinout of MIT, is on a mission to address both problems with a single solution. The company has developed an AI-powered robotic manufacturing platform capable of turning single-use plastics into durable building materials.
The company emerged from MIT HAUS, a research effort in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering that's short for "Home Architecture for Universal Sustainability." Atlas uses waterless plastic recycling and large-scale composite additive manufacturing technology to make parts like home foundations, decks, and trusses for walls, floors, and roofs.
"Our mission is to convert waste plastic pollution into durable composites to build 1 billion homes," says Atlas chair and co-founder A.J. Perez '13, MNG '14, PhD '23, who is also an MIT research scientist. "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."
Atlas' parts are already being used to support barns, sheds, decks, and docks. Most recently, the company supplied the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with American-made recycled composite trusses to construct a 40-foot bridge in a Massachusetts wetland.
Perez and Atlas co-founder Matt Pouliot envision deploying thousands of their AI robotic production systems around the world. A key enabler for that scale is the company's ability to recycle low-grade plastic into building components without water.
"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. We strive to study these issues in the real world, not just a lab. When you talk to government officials about creating a new recycling facility, they have to get the local water agency involved, there's permitting, etc. A lot of that work disappears with the waterless recycling process."
Research for impact
Since earning his PhD at MIT, Perez has been developing advanced fabrication techniques for homes and new techniques for plastic recycling. In 2019, he started MIT HAUS with David Hardt, MIT's Ralph E. and Eloise F. Cross Professor in Manufacturing.
"It started with the simple mission of enabling the production of 1 billion homes over a 30-year period," Perez says. "Then we realized how much the materials needed for those homes would strain global supply chains."
Perez says building those homes using conventional methods would require a doubling of global production capacity for materials like concrete, not to mention a dramatic acceleration of global deforestation.
"That's where the light bulb went off," Perez says. "There's this other problem humanity has, which is 8 gigatons of plastic that have been produced and are polluting our oceans, rivers, and cities. We decided to plug two really big, hairy problems together."
Perez met Pouliot, a former Maine senator, and the pair started Atlas to commercialize the technology Perez had been developing at MIT. The founders worked with MIT's Technology Licensing Office and have since worked with researchers at other universities to independently develop technology for the company's robotic manufacturing platform, which the founders call the Atlas Factory Stack.
First, single-use plastic from water bottles and other objects is shredded and fed into the Atlas system, where it is melted and fused with American-made fiberglass to make it stronger than wood. From there, a large-scale 3D printer creates the parts, including trusses for floors, walls, roofs, and bridges.
Through research at MIT, Perez has shown large composite trusses can be printed in under 13 minutes and support over 4,000 pounds, exceeding key building standards.
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"At MIT, we've demonstrated we can produce 60 to 80 pounds of parts per hour, and the systems we're specifying in Atlas factories operate in the 150 to 200 pound per hour range," Perez says. "There's the potential for our robotic manufacturing platform to produce each part at a lower cost than injection molding, and it's far more flexible and convenient. For example, we can manufacture the parts in the reverse order so that they'll be placed on the finished goods pallet next to the machine."
The founders envision Atlas as a technology provider enabling the creation of home factories close to wherever homes need to be built. Today, each Atlas factory cell is capable of producing the structural framing components for about one small home per day.
"The old way of doing things would be some huge factory in China would mass produce one type of part and ship it far away," Perez says. "I don't think that's good for the planet. Another reason we don't use injection molding is economic: Mega factories don't produce as many jobs and have a much higher carbon footprint. We want this to be localized to benefit local communities. The plastic is already everywhere. The more local Atlas is, the lower the cost and footprint."
Going global
Plastics last far longer than wood, especially for applications where they're in contact with the ground or water. That adds to the company's environmental benefits.
"If you get a material into the building world and it does its job, it's going to be used for a very long time and not need to be recycled again for a very long time," Pouliot says. "That's important because when you recycle something over and over again, it degrades. This is one of the most sustainable use cases for recycled petrochemical products."
Atlas' bridge with the Army Corps of Engineers was installed in less than a day. The founders are also in talks with international franchise partners to deploy the Atlas Factory Stack across the globe.
"To accomplish our mission, I fundamentally believe it's not going to be one far-away company dominating the industry," Perez says. "It's going to be every country leveraging Atlas Factory Stacks to create local recycling jobs, local factory jobs, local construction jobs, and to stimulate their economies with local materials."
