Could Recycled Plastic Lead to More Housing?

When you think about building a house, what materials come to mind? Brick, wood and metal all come to mind; there are also some very distinctive glass houses out there. (Even if their occupants should refrain from throwing stones — though honestly, that’s a good tip for indoor living in general.) A group of MIT researchers have come up with a very different way of making buildings, and it’s one that also addresses an ongoing waste issue.

“We’ve estimated that the world needs about 1 billion new homes by 2050. If we try to make that many homes using wood, we would need to clear-cut the equivalent of the Amazon rainforest three times over,” explained AJ Perez, who conducts his research in the MIT Office of Innovation. The title of a paper written by Perez and his colleagues — “Design, Manufacture and Testing of Structural Trusses Using Additively Manufactured Polymer Composites” — gives a sense of the solution that they have in mind.

Using a 3-D printer, the scientists used recycled plastic to make floor trusses, then tested them to determine how much weight they could support. They found that these trusses, which weigh just 13 pounds, can support more than 4,000 pounds of weight — a number that exceeds the standard set by the U.S. government.

There is one other advantage to the approach taken by Perez and his colleagues: this use of recycled plastic does not require the plastic in question to be clean. “The questions we’ve been asking are, what is the dirty, unwanted plastic good for, and how do we use the dirty plastic as-is?” Perez said; this looks like one encouraging answer.

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This has long been an area of interest for Perez. Along with another of the co-authors on the recent paper, David Hardt, he is a co-founder of MIT HAUS. Based within MIT’s Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity, MIT HAUS has explored how to use recycled polymer products in the process of making housing since 2019.

The work described in the paper written by Perez and his colleagues doesn’t stop here; there are questions about affordability that still need to be explored further. But it’s an enticing glimpse into a way to solve two problems in tandem.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…