MIT spinout turns plastic waste into resilient building materials
The world needs more homes.
Images for download on the MIT News office website are made available to non-commercial entities, press and the general public under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license . You may not alter the images provided, other than to crop them to size. A credit line must be used when reproducing images; if one is not provided below, credit the images to "MIT."
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.