MIT researchers are giving millions of plastic bottles a new life by turning plastic waste into homes, decks and bridges using AI robots

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.

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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.

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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.

Through his MIT research, Perez demonstrated that large composite trusses can be printed in less than 13 minutes and support more than 4,000 pounds, exceeding key building standards.

“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.”

Since earning his PhD at MIT, Perez has worked on advanced fabrication methods for homes as well as different approaches to plastic recycling. In 2019, he launched 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 said producing those homes through conventional construction methods would require a major increase in global production of materials such as concrete, while also putting greater pressure on forests.

“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 later partnered with Pouliot, a former Maine senator, to launch Atlas and commercialize the technology he had been developing at MIT. The founders worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office and researchers at other universities to further develop the company’s robotic manufacturing platform, known as the Atlas Factory Stack

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.”