A nonpsychoactive variant of cannabis called hemp is emerging as a renewable alternative to traditional building materials. Long before cannabis prohibition effectively banned the cultivation of all types of cannabis, hemp was used for centuries to make everything from clothes and ropes to sails and riggings in ships.
However, hemp cultivation and use in the United States was prohibited for several decades until Congress legalized the cannabis variant via the 2018 Farm Bill. With many states launching individual hemp programs in the years after, hemp has attracted significant attention because of its many potential applications.
One of the more revolutionary applications is using hemp as a renewable building block in building construction. Cement production produces around 8% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, making the sector one of the largest polluters on the globe. Using cement for construction also results in a host of issues because it creates unyielding surfaces with low insulation.
While the hunt for a large-scale cement replacement still hasn’t yielded any tangible possibilities, hemp presents the real-estate sector with a greener small-scale alternative. Mixing hemp hurds with either lime, pozzolans or sand creates a biocomposite breathable material called hemp-lime or hempcrete that can function as a small-scale alternative to cement.
Kaja Kühl, urban designer and founder of a New York-based design and building practice called youarethecity, says hemp fiber has “enormous growth potential” for construction and insulation in North America. She took part in a Columbia University initiative to help institute environmental initiatives in the Hudson Valley and used hemp-lime to complete two cottages on an upstate New York farm.
Since hemp-lime blocks aren’t load bearing, they are typically used to provide efficient thermal insulation and construct interior walls. Kühl used timber and prefabricated hempcrete bricks to design cottages with reduced carbon impact on the Wally Farms in upstate New York. The urban designer notes that a growing number of fabricators, designers and advocates consider biobased construction materials such as hempcrete as a means of reducing the upfront carbon footprint of traditional building materials.
Hemp has shown that it can capture more than twice its weight in carbon two times as fast as conventional forestry, allowing the cannabis variant to capture a whopping 15 tons of carbon dioxide per hectare via photosynthesis. If 25% of all the agricultural land used for livestock and dairy in the world is used for hemp cultivation, it would close the annual UN emissions gap of 23 gigatons of carbon dioxide.
Kühl says choosing carbon-sequestering materials such as hemp as construction materials could put the world on track to achieving carbon neutrality by mid-century.
As companies such as Trulieve Cannabis Corp. (CSE: TRUL) (OTCQX: TCNNF) focus on extracting medicinal products from the hemp and marijuana plant, new verticals are emerging that seek to make construction materials from what might otherwise be regarded as waste-plant matter.
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