Problems and opportunities for the RPCs of the next future

Several years operation at LHC and in Cosmic Ray (CR) detection with the Argo YBJ experiment, have shown that the RPC working gas represents a problem both for cost and environment impact. This paper analyses the problem and investigates possible solutions. On the other hand the physics results obtained by the RPC detectors confirm their potential in the basic and applied research. This potential is also analysed in this paper and suggestions to improve the performance are presented. In particular the effect of the electrode thickness over the pulse amplitude is studied. Further applications to the CR physics with ground based detectors are considered and recent results on the RPCs space resolution achievable with the charge centroid method are finally presented.