MIT Spinout Atlas Turns Plastic Bottles Into Building Materials

Atlas, a company spun out of MIT research, aims to turn discarded plastic into durable building materials strong enough to construct homes, bridges and other structures without cutting down trees or mining raw materials. "We're turning bottles into buildings," said chair and co-founder A.J. Perez, an MIT research scientist who developed the underlying technology while earning his PhD there.

The company's robotic manufacturing system, called the Atlas Factory Stack, shreds single-use plastic such as water bottles, melts it, and fuses it with American-made fiberglass to create a composite stronger than wood; a large-scale 3D printer then forms the material into trusses for floors, walls, roofs, bridges and other structural parts. Because the process recycles low-grade plastic without using water, Perez says it can be deployed in any country regardless of local water access, avoiding the permitting and water-agency approvals a conventional recycling facility would need.

Atlas's parts already support barns, sheds, decks and docks, and the company recently supplied the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with recycled composite trusses to build a 40-foot bridge in a Massachusetts wetland, installed in less than a day. Through research at MIT, Perez has shown that large composite trusses can be printed in under 13 minutes and support more than 4,000 pounds, exceeding key building standards; MIT tests demonstrated production of 60 to 80 pounds of parts per hour, while the systems specified for Atlas factories run at 150 to 200 pounds per hour.

Each Atlas factory cell today can produce the structural framing components for about one small home per day, and the founders — Perez and co-founder Matt Pouliot, a former Maine senator — plan to deploy the robotic production systems in local factories around the world rather than manufacturing in one large facility and shipping parts long distances. They are already in talks with international franchise partners to expand the Atlas Factory Stack globally.

"This is one of the most sustainable use cases for recycled petrochemical products," Pouliot said, noting that once a plastic composite is built into a structure, it can last a long time without needing to be recycled again — unlike plastic that degrades each time it is reprocessed.