Hemp Bound (8 page)

“This is the . . . future,” owner Karon Korp told CNN, while her husband, former Asheville mayor Russ Martin, raved about the low utility bills he pays in the upscale, thirty-three-hundred-square-foot pad. A clean interior environment was the big selling point for the family. “The house itself is an air filter,” said its designer, Anthony Brenner.

Flavall's Hemp Technologies website even has a page of prototype hemp structures they'll build for you, ranging from a single-family loft to an apartment complex to, for gosh sakes, a mixed-use commercial site.

Still think it's a pipe dream? Hempcrete is featured in a new, 195,000-square-foot British Marks & Spencer department store. That project delivered me a memo:
Check out what's happening with hemp across the Pond
.

I guess that North Carolina's mini hemp housing boom answers the livability question. I mean, I didn't have the budget to time-travel ahead three hundred years to see if all of today's hemp houses are still standing and happily occupied as promised. But the revolution well under way in European construction—which was the biggest stunner in my research for this project—is kind of like time travel. Two decades' worth.

Which is to say that all this North American V8 head slapping about hemp's proving a serious contender for “Go-To Building Material of the Sustainability Era” is old hat on the other side of the Atlantic. In fact, hemp mixtures are being used not just for insulation, but for load-bearing-construction applications as well.

No-brainer
was Lime Technology vice president and director of technology Ian Pritchett's choice of phrase about hempcrete
25
building when we Skyped and I asked, “Why the heck aren't you Europeans telling us about all this hemp construction?” Like most of the hemp executives with whom I met, Pritchett was not wearing a tie when we interviewed, even though his construction company is already classified, thanks to its ten million euros in sales in 2012, as a British SME (small to medium enterprise). They're past the start-up phase, is what I'm saying. This is not a fellow hawking granola at a crunchy trade show.

Even with two hundred houses and fifty commercial buildings under his belt, including an attractive little English housing complex known as The Triangle, the British hemp builder did attach a condition to his no-brainer assessment.

“The target market for us is people who are building a structure they'll run themselves,” Pritchett told me. “So that the construction costs and the energy costs are coming from the same person. Then it's a no-brainer. Even when it's a little more expensive to build, it's much cheaper to run. But if the builder only cares about the immediate costs, then that's for now a tougher sell.”

The longer view Pritchett's speaking about starts with climate change mitigation at the very building site: You have to heat concrete as high as three thousand degrees. Not so hemp/lime. This is why many of the conclusions you'll find in the European Industrial Hemp Association trade group's “Assessment of Life Cycle Studies on Hemp Fibre Applications” paper
26
show hemp pulling ahead—or farther ahead—of a diverse array of synthetic and fossil-based industrial applications once length of use is factored in.

Seeming to anticipate hemp building similarly proving a no-brainer for northern Canada back at the brisk Winnipeg hemp house site, Deputy Housing Minister Cramer called hempcrete's likely performance the “easy part” of the project. On durability alone, she echoed (albeit in a sub-Arctic version) what hemp-friendly Hawaiian legislators told me about the plant's impressive resistance to the tropical plague of termites. “Here the problem is mold, and it's doing great in tests at the university [of Manitoba] so far,” Cramer said.

The actual trickiest hurdle that future builders and entrepreneurs will face, Cramer surprised me by revealing, is “each municipality's unique building codes. We're documenting how we maneuver through that whole process, and our construction industry players are watching. City bylaws are always a pain for builders.”

Cramer might be ironing out the mundane wrinkles in construction bureaucracy, which I'm sure is an essential part of any building equation when a new material enters the marketplace. But it struck me by the time I started skidding back out into Winnipeg traffic that day that what we're talking about with hemp-based construction is more than a revolution in the building industry. It's a revolution in society.

Why do I say something so dramatic? Because cement plants alone contribute 5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and the construction industry was responsible for more than 8 percent of the U.S. GDP in 2007. Make that huge industry not just sustainable but domestically produced and you're at once betting on America's economic and atmospheric future.

North Carolina hemp house designer Callahan told me that the only thing keeping hemp building technology from domestic cost-effectiveness today is having to import the actual hemp.

“That would be a huge boon to us,” he told me of being able to get ready-to-go building material from Cleveland or Lexington, Kentucky, instead of the UK or Canada. “And it would almost certainly be the turning point for the domestic hemp construction industry.”

Construction, in other words, is going to be the first domestic hemp fiber breakout market. Steve Levine, CFO of the Hemp Industries Association trade group and a fellow who's been selling hemp products in the United States since 1997, said he has little doubt that hempcrete will be the first dual-cropping sector to explode.

“If I were a venture capitalist with ten million in play, I'd invest in building materials,” he said. “Once there are processing plants Stateside, once Kentucky and Southern California are growing industrial cannabis, the battle is mostly won and we'll see exponential growth.”

Chapter Five

Heck, Grow Your Whole Tractor
Out of Hemp

Y
ou know James Bond's gadget guy, Q? Best job in the world, as far as I and about ten million other fourteen-year-olds-at-heart are concerned. That's pretty much Simon Potter's gig at the Winnipeg-based Composites Innovation Centre (CIC) we've been visiting. His title is sector manager for product innovation. Oh, how I crave such a title. “Hold my calls, Ms. Moneypenny, I'm working on the Invisibility Suit this morning.”

As we toured the warehouse-sized CIC labs (hidden in a nondescript outskirt like British Intelligence headquarters would be), I kept expecting to see wristwatches shooting poison darts at targets and men in beekeeper suits absorbing small rocket attacks without harm. There was even a Moneypenny-type character at the sleek, overlarge, semicircular front desk, who offered me a kind of futuristically labeled water bottle.

Only Potter doesn't work for MI5. He works for the future of the atmosphere. Funded, of course (since this is anywhere on the planet but today's United States), as a nonprofit by the federal and provincial Canadian governments in partnership with various private foundations and industry players.

Hemp is prominent here at this facility whose formidable engineering and biological minds are dedicated to designing not the cheapest, not the most appealing-to-young-demographics, but rather the
best
of tomorrow's industrial materials.

And the multi-team work at the center is showing that biocomposites—naturally sourced plastics and replacements for toxic or petroleum-dependent materials like fiberglass, particleboard, and plywood—are performing best in an incredibly broad array of industrial applications.

“I don't know why we forgot, institutionally, about this plant's uses,” Potter said of cannabis at one point on our tour. This is a well-funded scientist who can, and does, work with any material he chooses.

Why is the remembering currently under way so vital? Composites are the fastest-growing segment of the wood products and plastics industries.
27
An eighty-billion-dollar market, Potter told me, rapping his knuckles on what looked like a huge, shiny vehicle hood. “And we can replace 30 percent of it immediately with biocomposites like this hemp tractor hood.”

I stopped in my tracks. Yes, what really blew the mind at the CIC was much closer to home than an Invisibility Suit for this solar-powered goat herder. I realized immediately that I'm a fellow who's in the market for a sustainable tractor. I just hadn't realized it was an option. I've been using a machete for my squash.

The tractor hood was shiny, curved in an appealingly contemporary design arc, and undentable by my hardest palm-heel hammer punch. It was beautiful. And it was grown from the local hemp harvest.

Plants, I had previously thought, go in the garden. They don't go into the manufacture of heavy machinery. To me, what I was looking at was as strange as a space shuttle or a senator being made out of industrial cannabis.

“It'll make a lighter, stronger, and considerably more fuel-efficient vehicle than the usual composites that go into heavy industrial structural components today,” Potter told me. “And it's grown by the farmers from the material it's going to harvest.”

That's not just a cute locavore gesture. “Natural fibers are cheaper than synthetic fibers, to start,” Potter explained. “And this tractor's body embodies a lot less energy in production than synthetic fiberglass body components.” Meaning, he said, “It off-gases far less carbon in production. Fiberglass is an energy-intensive process to make.”

“Why do you think The Hemp Reaper or whatever you're calling it will result in greater fuel efficiency?” I asked.

Potter pointed at a nearby hunk of “traditional” plastic. “Because it's 30 percent lighter than that synthetic composite. That will translate to greatly increased fuel efficiency in the vehicle.” (Also, as we'll see, it can one day be fueled by hemp.)

Then he laid the zinger on me when I asked as skeptically as I could, “Are we really going to see hemp semi trucks? Hemp airplanes? Hemp as a major industrial component competing with or even replacing the major materials of today like steel, fiberglass, and petroleum-based plastics?”

“I think it's absolutely inevitable,” Potter said confidently and without pause. “It's the only way we're going to have structural materials in the future. We can't rely on fossil sources anymore.”

The smart men and women at the vanguard of biocomposite research are on the case. “We've moved beyond the experimental with this project,” Potter said, clomping the clear-finished hemp fiber tractor hood again. “We're into the implementation of these things. This is going to be a commercial product.”

Potter explained that, although the CIC is a nonprofit and government-funded, the center's teams are allowed to be entrepreneurial. So when the tractor body's field-testing is done, they'll likely partner with a commercial vehicle-production company on the engine, transmission, electronics, and drive train—the moving parts, in other words. “Or,” he said, “you can buy the hemp body from us and design your own vehicle.”

Holey Gazoley, I can't wait to see
that
in the John Deere or Caterpillar showroom. A documentary called
Government Grown
mentions that International Harvester once made a combine that worked “with the tallest hemp stalks.” Surely that blueprint is somewhere.

My hope is that the CIC and its partners will work the necessary features into the final product and release it on a commercial scale. That'd certainly be useful to our hemp pioneer Grant Dyck, whose harvesting equipment burst into flames (twice) in 2012. I hereby offer my online handle of Organic Cowboy as the tractor's model name in exchange for a reasonable franchising fee. Though The Hemp Reaper is pretty good, too.

I'm kind of expecting a call on one of these, based on Potter's industrial intelligence report. “We have automotive industry designers coming by almost on a weekly basis asking, ‘When are these materials going to be ready?'” he told me.

To address industry interest in all of its work, Potter said the CIC is developing a project called FibreCITY, which is a replicable franchising system for anyone who wants to open a fiber-processing facility “appropriate to their regional cellulosic needs in Kentucky, Australia, or China.” Could be you.

That morning's tour made me further optimistic that my descendants will have a breathable atmosphere without humanity returning to the Stone Age. The CIC is demonstrating a real-world mechanism by which a sustainable industrial cannabis infrastructure can reestablish itself.

There is a wrinkle to work out with the industrial and high-tech sides of hemp, though. Though each bend in the CIC facility revealed another hemp marvel (I especially loved the load-bearing hemp wall used for its sound-insulating qualities by CIC engineers to keep their own loud compressor machinery from distracting them), some applications require what Potter calls “greater fiber consistency.”

My tour guide that sunny subzero day was broaching a technical issue that, though hardly insurmountable, the North American hemp industry has hardly begun to address.

It goes like this: Yes, Potter says, hemp's most passionate advocates are correct that the plant's tensile strength is (or can be) greater than steel's. But farmers, especially in the young, seed-oil-centric North American fields, are not yet growing for fiber that displays this quality. It's possible that the perfect industrial cultivars don't yet exist.

Thus, Potter told me, “We're starting to work with farmers to breed the kind of consistent, strong bast fibers that are absolutely essentially for sophisticated technological and industrial applications.” The whole conversation left me wondering,
Any grad students out there looking for a dissertation project?

“We even have to examine the soil nutritive regime, which can damage the fibers,” Potter said. He laughed, then added in a conspiratorial tone, “Today farmers beat the crap out of the fiber during harvest. And once we do come up with ideal cultivars for our applications, we have to be able to replicate the breeding processes.”

Okay then
, I thought.
Let's get to work
. I felt safe thinking that because those blessed Canadians have a hemp GMO ban prophylactically in place. Seriously, it's a cool country. Even though the rumors that Fox News is banned there aren't true. I didn't see it on anywhere, though.