Could you make a lightbulb out of plastic?

[SmackFu]

Plastic can replace glass in a lot of places. Why not lightbulbs, especially flourescents?

[Squink]

A Fluorescent bulb has a pretty good vacuum inside, around 0.15 mm of mercury, so a thin plastic tube would probably collapse over time. You’d also have problems with the plastic outgassing molecules of monomer into the cavity, where they’d react with the mercury vapor.
A plastic, argon filled, incandescent lamp might last a while, if you made the bulb big enough to dissipate heat without melting.

[chukhung]

@SmackFu

Plastic can replace glass in a lot of places. Why not lightbulbs, especially flourescents?

Instead of fluorescents, why not use high intensity LEDs? From this page

But what if you could buy a bulb that will last for 10 years, use about a tenth of the electricity and cost no more than three times that of a standard bulb? And it can bounce.

Jack Goeken thinks he has created just such a superbulb, and it’s scheduled to hit the market this year with the backing of bulb giant Westinghouse Lighting Corp.
…
At Goeken’s company – PolyBrite International Inc. – inventors discovered a way to take the light from a single LED and disperse it through a plastic ribbon to enhance the light’s effect. After several years of work, Carl Scianna, PolyBrite’s president, has packaged LEDs along with the electronics that power them in a plastic bulb-shaped product.

[Bolding added]