#Plastic Drinking #Water Pipes - a thread

"Why do we use plastic drinking water pipes?"

Plastic pipes can be a HUGE material cost savings when it comes to service lines and building plumbing. They're flexible too, sometimes enabling faster installation. 1/

The plastics are like spaghetti. Each noodle is a polymer chain or string of atoms. We can visualize the polymer chains like a bowl of spaghetti.

Chemical structure and temperature strongly influences flexibility. 2/

Thermoplastics have polymer chains that can slide around. The greater the temperature the closer you may get to moving or flowing polymer chains = melting plastic.

Thermosets have crosslinked polymer chains. The chains are bonded TO one another. They cannot melt. 3/

We use some plastic pipes for transporting cold or room temperature water only because if we used them for hot water transport the pipes may deform or melt!

For hot water pipes we often use thermoset pipes... OR plastics with a high glass transition temperature or Tg. 4/

Then, there are multilayer pipes. These often are used for hot water in an attempt to keep hot water hot. These, to my knowledge, are not used for drinking water applications, but can be found in buildings. 5/

Plastics are used for building water system applications like Icemaker lines, refrigerator lines, faucet connectors for sinks, they're in commercial buildings, and more. Better understanding how new, aged, and damaged plastics interact with our environment is important. 6/end