“There’s been a rethinking with hemp, mostly in the past five years, but it’s been going on under the current since the ’90s,” Shah says. Shah says that envelope helped lower the building’s carbon emissions by 18-20%. The walls are made of hempcrete, and the building is clad in a custom-made corrugated material made of hemp fibers and bio-resin. Together with London-based Practice Architecture, Barron converted his 53-acre Margent Farm in Cambridgeshire to hemp production and used the crops to build his own house.
Last year, Shah collaborated with the Irish-British filmmaker Steve Barron (who directed the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”). (It takes about 150 days from the moment the seeds are planted to the moment the product is complete.) Once hemp is harvested, the company uses a soy-based adhesive to bind the fiber stalks, compress them, and bake the material to form HempWood blocks. The manufacturing process is radically different, too. HempWood looks a lot like wood, but it has been rated 20% stronger than hickory, which is the hardest commercially available hardwood in the country. HempWood flooring, the company’s most popular product, was even featured in BMW’s concept showroom in Los Angeles last month. The company has projects all over the country: from the dorm of a medical school in Louisville to corporate offices in New York City. In the coming years, Wilson plans to expand into outdoor decking, waterproof flooring and structural lumber. In two factories in Kentucky, he started with hemp-based lumber, but the business has since grown to HempWood flooring and furniture. Gregory Wilson founded HempWood the same year hemp was legalized in the U.S. In Durham, North Carolina, Plantd is prototyping a hemp-based Oriented Strand Board (a kind of material often used to sheath roofs, walls, and floors.) And in Kentucky, a company called HempWood is using hemp fibers to manufacture alternative wood. In Ketchum, Idaho, a startup called Hempitecture creates HempWool, a type of insulation made of 95% hemp fibers as well as hempcrete blocks. Farm Bill was amended to legalize agricultural hemp, and the industry has slowly been growing. (Before the ban, Henry Ford famously used hemp fiber composites in his first Model T car.) is still catching up, in large part because hemp production was banned in 1937, when the Marijuana Tax Act was passed. Today, China is the world’s largest producer of hemp, followed by France, the largest producer in the European Union. It doesn’t help that hempcrete is currently more expensive than concrete, but in the long term, they said it can help building owners save on energy bills thanks to its insulation properties. They said the main challenge with hemp is to convince clients that it’s a viable alternative to concrete, especially when a hemp wall looks a little more rustic and not as refined as concrete. It can weigh about an eighth of regular concrete, but the architects said they chose it for its acoustic and thermal properties as well its resistance to fire. Hempcrete is made from mixing hemp with lime and water. The hemp panels were grown and fabricated within 310 miles of the site. Its walls are infilled with hempcrete blocks, then clad with cement-fiber panels to protect the hemp blocks from the elements. Designed by French studio Lemoal Lemoal, the 4,000 square-foot facility, called the Pierre Chevet Sports Center, sits in the town of Croissy-Beaubourg near Paris. This summer marked the completion of France’s first public building to be made of hemp. Together with other biomaterials like algae, mycelium, or even coffee husks, hemp is gaining popularity as one of the world’s most sustainable materials-if only we didn’t have to jump through regulatory hoops to grow it. It is lighter and less expensive than wood, and according to recent studies, it can capture carbon twice as effectively as a forest of trees.īuilding materials are responsible for 11% of global carbon emissions, and as the building industry continues to look for ways to lower its carbon footprint, scientists, architects and manufacturers alike are turning to natural materials. It can be cultivated in 90 to 120 days, which is 100 times faster than oak trees. A strain of the ubiquitous Cannabis sativa (yes, it is the same one that produces marijuana, but it cannot contain more than 0.3 percent of THC), hemp can grow up to 13 feet in a matter of months.
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