MIT Spinout Atlas Turns Single-Use Plastics Into Resilient Building Materials
Atlas Building Composites fuses shredded, single-use plastic with glass fiber in a waterless process, then uses 3D printing to produce trusses, foundations and decking, most recently for a 40-foot U.S. Army Corps of Engineers bridge.
Single-use plastic from water bottles and other objects are shredded and fed into the Atlas system, where it is melted and fused with fiberglass. From there, a large-scale 3D printer creates the parts, including trusses for floors, walls, roofs and bridges. Source | Atlas Building Composites, MIT News
Atlas Building Composites, a spinout of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.), is commercializing a robotic manufacturing platform that converts single-use plastic waste into glass fiber-reinforced composite (GFRP) structural parts for buildings and infrastructure, MIT News reports. The company’s parts are already in use in barns, sheds, decks and docks, and it most recently supplied recycled composite trusses to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Washington, D.C., U.S.) for a 40-foot bridge in a Massachusetts wetland.
The platform, which the founders call the Atlas Factory Stack, shreds plastic from water bottles and other single-use items, melts it and fuses it with fiberglass. A large-scale 3D printer then produces the parts, including trusses for floors, walls, roofs and bridges, as well as home foundations and decks. Atlas describes the AI-driven system’s recycling step as waterless, which co-founder and chair A.J. Perez notes enables processing of low-grade plastic and eliminates much of the water agency coordination and permitting involved in establishing a conventional recycling facility.
Atlas emerged from MIT Home Architecture for Universal Sustainability (HAUS), a research effort in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering that Perez, also an MIT research scientist, started in 2019 with professor David Hardt. Perez co-founded the company with Matt Pouliot, a former Maine senator, and the pair licensed the technology through MIT’s Technology Licensing Office. In earlier MIT HAUS research, the team printed 8-foot floor trusses in under 13 minutes each; a floor frame built from four of the trusses supported more than 4,000 pounds, exceeding key U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) building standards.
“At MIT, we’ve demonstrated we can produce 60-80 pounds of parts per hour, and the systems we’re specifying in Atlas factories operate in the 150-200 pound per hour range,” Perez says. Each Atlas factory cell is currently capable of producing structural framing components for about one small home per day.
The founders position Atlas as a technology provider for localized home factories built near where housing is needed, and report they are in talks with international franchise partners to deploy the Atlas Factory Stack globally. Perez and Pouliot envision thousands of the robotic production systems operating worldwide.
For more on Atlas Building Composites’ technology and plans, read the original story from MIT News.
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