Since plastic doesn’t biodegrade, why aren’t more houses built with plastic instead of wood parts?
In: Engineering
Wood is cheaper. That is all.
You could make plastic equivalents to the structural timber used for houses but lengths of 4-by-2 are amazingly cheap. Plastic replacements would have issues to overcome but you can be that, if there was money in it, the industry would find a way. Two that occur to me are that: nailing plastic wouldn’t work well and you’d need to change the fixing systems used; and sunlight kills plastic so you’d have to take care to make sure it didn’t penetrate to strutural members.
Of course using plastic to replace wood would be an environmental disaster but that factor still loses out economics. There’s a huge amount of plastic already used in home construction. My house is clad with foamed polystyrene 4″ thick.
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