Building Houses with Hemp

There is a company called Hemp Technologies that is doing some great work in the Asheville, NC area with residential construction using hemp hurds mixed with lime to create "hempcrete" that is proving to be a fantastic construction material. You can check out their website here: Hemp Technologies

Hemp is one of mankind's oldest building materials with amazing thermal and carbon-sequestering properties and finished structures made of hemp and lime can last hundreds of years and then be used as fertilizer at the end of the buildings useful life rather than end up as useless landfill. Hemp houses have no termite problems and the hempcrete structure actually gains additional structural integrity over time as the hempcrete ages into a rock-like substance.

There are companies building houses from hemp in several countries around the world including England, France, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. Finally the USA has joined the club.

The more I learn about hemp the more impressed I become with this miracle plant, cannabis. And the more astounded I am that hemp is still illegal to grow in the USA. Cui bono ("To whose benefit?", literally "as a benefit to whom?") Who benefits from the fact that hemp is illegal to grow in the USA? Opinions vary greatly on this topic and I should do an entire post on this, but I suspect the biggest beneficiary is law enforcement. The federal government and law enforcement does not recognize any distinction between industrial hemp and marijuana (the male and female plants of cannabis) even though industrial hemp contains less than a fraction of a percent of THC compared with marijuana that can contain up to 20% THC, so keeping hemp illegal is part of law enforcement's strategy to keep marijuana, in all its forms, illegal so that they can maintain their budgets around the absurd and failed 'war on drugs.' Sort of a Full Employment Act for police and prison guards.

But that is only part of the story. With hemp a viable competitor to cotton, wood pulp paper, oil and many of its derivatives, and thousands of other consumer and industrial products, all these industries benefit from the lack of competition from hemp.

And of course we can't rule out plain old sloth and inertia. Hemp is illegal because it has been illegal since 1937 (with a temporary wartime reprieve during the 1940s) and until very recently, no politician had anything to gain standing up for hemp because his opponents would accuse him of being 'soft on crime'.

But now that the baby boomers are learning the truth about hemp and the distinction between hemp and marijuana, and now that most every other industrialized country around the world is growing hemp with no problems and lots of new jobs and revenue, America is finally waking up.

The rumor mill around the VoteHemp organization (VoteHemp) is that with a new governor in California we may see some new legislation in 2011 in favor of industrial hemp that may force the feds to finally act on this issue. Many states have already passed laws legalizing industrial hemp but no farmer will plant a crop yet because the feds will not stand down on the issue. They still consider any industrial hemp crop as a marijuana grow and will arrest and prosecute anyone who plants a single seed. North Dakota has been suing the feds for action on industrial hemp with no luck for years. It is time to legalize hemp.

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