“Our mission is to transform waste plastic air pollution into sturdy composites to construct 1 billion properties,” says Atlas chair and co-founder A.J. Perez ’13, MNG ’14, PhD ’23, who can also be an MIT analysis scientist. “You possibly can’t divorce this stuff from one another. We’re not right here simply to construct properties, and we’re not right here simply to recycle plastic. The traditional method of constructing properties entails slicing down bushes, mining, refining, and a bunch of different soiled actions. We wish to keep away from all that and deal with all of the plastic sure for our oceans and landfills. We’re turning bottles into buildings.”
Atlas’ components are already getting used to assist barns, sheds, decks, and docks. Most not too long ago, the corporate equipped the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers with American-made recycled composite trusses to assemble a 40-foot bridge in a Massachusetts wetland.
Perez and Atlas co-founder Matt Pouliot envision deploying hundreds of their AI robotic manufacturing techniques all over the world. A key enabler for that scale is the corporate’s potential to recycle low-grade plastic into constructing elements with out water.
“That is key to democratizing recycling,” Perez says. “Now, each nation all over the world, no matter their water entry, will have the ability to do one thing about their plastic. We attempt to review these points in the true world, not only a lab. Once you speak to authorities officers about creating a brand new recycling facility, they must get the native water company concerned, there’s allowing, and so forth. A whole lot of that work disappears with the waterless recycling course of.”
Analysis for influence
Since incomes his PhD at MIT, Perez has been creating superior fabrication methods for properties and new methods for plastic recycling. In 2019, he began MIT HAUS with David Hardt, MIT’s Ralph E. and Eloise F. Cross Professor in Manufacturing.
“It began with the easy mission of enabling the manufacturing of 1 billion properties over a 30-year interval,” Perez says. “Then we realized how a lot the supplies wanted for these properties would pressure international provide chains.”
Perez says constructing these properties utilizing typical strategies would require a doubling of worldwide manufacturing capability for supplies like concrete, to not point out a dramatic acceleration of worldwide deforestation.
“That’s the place the sunshine bulb went off,” Perez says. “There’s this different drawback humanity has, which is 8 gigatons of plastic which were produced and are polluting our oceans, rivers, and cities. We determined to plug two actually huge, bushy issues collectively.”
Perez met Pouliot, a former Maine senator, and the pair began Atlas to commercialize the know-how Perez had been creating at MIT. The founders labored with MIT’s Know-how Licensing Workplace and have since labored with researchers at different universities to independently develop know-how for the corporate’s robotic manufacturing platform, which the founders name the Atlas Manufacturing unit Stack.
First, single-use plastic from water bottles and different objects is shredded and fed into the Atlas system, the place it’s melted and fused with American-made fiberglass to make it stronger than wooden. From there, a large-scale 3D printer creates the components, together with trusses for flooring, partitions, roofs, and bridges.
By analysis at MIT, Perez has proven massive composite trusses will be printed in beneath 13 minutes and assist over 4,000 kilos, exceeding key constructing requirements.
