Plastic pipework
piping made from plastic material

Plastic pipe is a tubular section, or hollow cylinder, made of plastic. It is usually, but not necessarily, of circular cross-section, used mainly to convey substances which can flow—liquids and gases (fluids), slurries, powders and masses of small solids. It can also be used for structural applications; hollow pipes are far stiffer per unit weight than solid members.
Plastic pipework is used for the conveyance of drinking water, waste water, chemicals, heating fluid and cooling fluids, foodstuffs, ultra-pure liquids, slurries, gases, compressed air, irrigation, plastic pressure pipe systems, and vacuum system applications.
Types
There are three basic types of plastic pipe:
Solid wall pipe
Extruded pipes consisting of one layer of a homogeneous matrix of thermoplastic material which is ready for use in a pipeline.
Structured wall pipe
Structured-wall pipes and fittings are products which have an optimized design with regard to material usage to achieve the physical, mechanical and performance requirements. Structured Wall Pipes are tailor made solutions of piping systems, for a variety of applications and in most cases developed in cooperation with users.
Barrier pipe
Pipe incorporating a flexible metallic layer as the middle of three bonded layers. Barrier pipe is used, for example, to provide additional protection for the contents passing through the pipe (particularly drinking water) from aggressive chemicals or other pollution when laid in ground contaminated by previous use.
Most plastic pipe systems are made from thermoplastic materials.
The public source identifies “Plastic pipework” as piping made from plastic material. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Plastic, pipework and piping.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2010296. The Library of Congress control number is sh85102346. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Plastic pipework” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.