Do You Realise How Sustainable Hemp is? Here’s a Breakdown
Almost everything that’s made with cotton, soy or corn can be substituted by hemp
Hemp is becoming big business, and it has nowt to do with unwashed hippies in kaftans. It’s also not because your aunt has just discovered smoking a doobie twice a week helps her arthritic pain. That’s marijuana, an entirely different strain of cannabis.
There has been a shift in perception around hemp in the last few years. A huge range of products is now being made from it.
Witnessing this boom, though, the first question that came to my mind was, “is hemp sustainable?”.
Okay, it would struggle to fare as badly as cotton, the world’s dirtiest crop. But our desperation for alternative materials mustn’t lead us to replace one evil with another, either.
A truly sustainable crop should give back to the environment, and not deplete it or leave harmful waste products. Thankfully hemp delivers, and excels in so many more areas.
A brief history of hemp
We first know of hemp being cultivated for fibre in 2800 BC in China, and farming thereafter spread to nearly every continent. It has been used for paper, rope, cloth and sails for thousands of years.
As hemp became gradually outlawed, however, it was overtaken in popularity by other materials like plastic, cotton and fossil fuels. The US’s Controlled Substances Act of 1970 mistakenly placed a blanket ban on all forms of cannabis, leaving poor non-psychotropic hemp out in the cold.
Growing hemp was legalised once more in 1965 in the UK, 2017 in Australia and 2018 in the US, albeit with strict regulations and limitations still in place.
What does hemp need to grow?
Hemp can thrive in many environments, although it’s best grown outside without heaps of intervention.
It’s technically a weed, so it doesn’t need much supplementary nutrition. It also has no real need for fungicides, herbicides or pesticides, meaning hemp is easier to farm organically than most other fibrous crops!
That highly pest-resistant nature makes hemp a good choice to plant amongst other plants, as it reduces the need for pesticides on them too.
Hemp has tap roots — a large central root with many branches that go deep into the soil and take water from it. The plant still needs a little extra hydration from watering or rainfall, but grows successfully using less water than most crops.
Hemp’s dense growth will prevent needing to weed out competitor plants often.
It takes up relatively little space, meaning growers can plant on average 400,000 plants in every acre.
Per acre, hemp produces four times as much pulp as trees, which also take years to reach maturity for harvest. Hemp, by contrast, is normally ready to harvest within four months.
All of these characteristics result in a plant that’s resilient and requires fewer resources to grow than its peers.
How much of the plant can be used?
Virtually every part of the hemp plant can be used, leading some to call it the ‘green buffalo’ of plants.
Bast fibre
These are the long, thin fibres that sit on the outer surface of the stalk. They perform really well for length, strength and antibacterial properties when compared with other natural fibres.
Bast fibres can be used on their own or woven with other materials. This is how you get the hemp cloth, canvas, rope, paper and clothing you might be more familiar with.
Hurd
This is the core, woody layer of the stalk. It can be used in a similar way as wood chips, so its many uses include animal bedding. Hurd is also used for biofuel, paper, MDF/particle board, plastics and in animal food.
Most impressively, it has extensive uses in construction. One square metre of timber-framed, hemp-lime wall, weighing 120kg, actually stores 35.5kg of CO2. This is in contrast to making a ton of steel or concrete, which emits 1.46 tonnes and 198kg of CO2, respectively.
Insulating materials derived from hurd are also capable of absorbing and releasing water vapour, meaning they can stabilise a building’s internal temperature effectively and reduce humidity in the air. This insulation can make energy-intensive systems designed to do these things redundant.
Seeds
Hemp seeds has an essential fatty acids profile to rival flaxseed, with the perfect balance of omega-3 to omega-6. They’re also high in protein, fibre, vitamin E and other nutrients.
The seeds can be pressed to produce oil or tinctures. And the oil is not only for consumption — it can also be used in adhesives, paints and plastics.
Leaves
These can simply be eaten, or used to make juice or tea. Some people also smoke them, for the calming effects of CBD without the THC (the cannabinoid in marijuana that gets you high).
Flowers
The flowers have similar nutritional and therapeutic profiles to the leaves, but with more CBD than other parts of the plant. They can be eaten, often by infusing the flowers in oil, or used in tinctures, ointments, CBD oils and to smoke.
Almost everything that could be made with cotton, soy or corn can be substituted for hemp instead. And given the often devastating environmental impact of those crops, it’s important that this is realised around the globe.
How does hemp interact with the environment?
Hemp acts as a carbon store, meaning it actually absorbs atmospheric CO2 via photosynthesis for as long as the plant exists. It’s literally carbon-negative for its whole lifespan. The CO2 is released again when its components are composted or burnt, but by replanting, you can absorb CO2 once more.
And those tap roots I mentioned earlier not only suck up water. They aerate and absorb toxins from the soil, improving its quality and the environment season after season.
Because hemp grows so easily and produces a versatile yield, it doesn’t require genetic modification. Most farmers report that their crops are grown organically.
What happens to the crop at the end of its life?
Hemp is fully compostable in its plant form — anything left over after harvest will break down into the soil and improve its quality for the next crop.
The biodegradability of products made from hemp depends on what else they consist of and how the materials were combined, so that’s a hard one to gauge.
As of June 2019, there were less than a million acres of hemp growing across the planet.
But it’s predicted to grow to a USD 15.26 billion industry by 2027.
The danger in widespread commodification of hemp is that it simply becomes the next cotton or palm oil — heavily exploited and aiding environmental catastrophe. Here’s hoping we’ve learned from our mistakes enough times now.
If it keeps being farmed as it is currently, hemp can surely only be seen as a powerful asset in our frightening battle against climate change.
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Originally published at https://carolineisawriter.com on July 1, 2020.
