We can wax on about what plastic would be ideal, but ultimately this is about making things from stuff you can find at a local hardware store.
So rather than go down this path, the way to go is to lobby hardware stores to carry "better" (by whatever metrics your judging PVC). It's not like we, as average humans, have unlimited choices in building materials. We choose from what's available at the store. PVC is at the store now.
Well yeah, that's kind of why I brought it up. PVC is cheap, available, and easy to use. Is there some other material that could replace PVC but made from less environmentally undesirable materials? Is it available at hardware store? If not, could it be?
Wood. Most, not all, of the examples from the page would have been equally easy and cheap to build with a set of rods or 2x2 beams. Looks a lot less tacky too.
GP made multiple suggestions and personally I read their comment as “here are some ideas, does anyone else have any?” Not an indictment of people using this material or a statement that there must be something better and everyone must switch to it.
Your comment comes across a bit off-tenor.
Also keen to hear if folks on here have other ideas (before you ask: I don’t have any).
> Generally, if there were a better solution we would be using it.
If this were actually the attitude people adopted, literally nothing would improve ever.
There is a saying, "everyone is a mechanical engineer". As one, we consistently have to field this kind of question in design reviews, etc.
The question, in general, is why don't you invent a new material to solve that problem, the answer generally is we don't have the budget on this $100k project to ask DOW chemical or 3M or BASF to spend 10 years designing a new plastic for us.
So while I agree in concept, in practice it's not really a helpful question/suggestion.
The way we MEs have learned to answer this question is to say we made from the most appropriate material given the requirements and operating conditions, if anyone is aware of a material that we should also try then please speak up.
Almost never is there someone that speaks up.
The other thing is there is a huge difference between "material exists " and material is mass produced and available to the general public.
In this case, to compete with PVC pipe by making some new better resin, extruding it into pipe, then making it readily available on the general market so that it's available enough to write a guidebook on how to use it to make stuff. That's a billion dollar investment.
I don’t think GP was asking for people on Hackernews to invent a general purpose, greener alternative to PVC.
I think they were asking whether there’s an alternative that hobbyist could use for these types of projects.
For example, there might be a material that’s significantly greener and a bit more expensive — enough so that a large scale project couldn’t justify the economic costs (i.e. it wouldn’t be a general purpose replacement for PVC), but such that a small project hobbyist would prefer to have that melting in their garage shop instead of PVC.
So rather than go down this path, the way to go is to lobby hardware stores to carry "better" (by whatever metrics your judging PVC). It's not like we, as average humans, have unlimited choices in building materials. We choose from what's available at the store. PVC is at the store now.