Interested in sustainability and new products then perhaps you should get into hemp, no we are not suggesting the “get stoned” variety, but rather industrial hemp, which has a myriad of uses.
Hemp is one of the oldest crops around; it is cultivated worldwide including Australia and is currently used as a source of clothing and building products.
Association with its THC laden cousin marijuana has tarnished hemp’s reputation, but it contains no or very low levels of THC, the chemical associated with the psychoactive properties of marijuana.
Instead, it’s a quick growing, water efficient crop that’s growing in demand.
It is legal to grow hemp in Australia, under the same licensing laws as poppy farms in Tasmania, but illegal to consume hemp food products.
The hemp industry has been lobbying the Australian government and Food Safety Standards Australia New Zealand (FSSANZ) for hemp seeds to be legalised, which could be the key to Australia’s hemp industry taking off.
FSSANZ has acknowledged hemp seeds contain protein, vitamins, minerals and omega-3 fatty acids.
Currently hemp is used in Europe, Canada and the United States in a range of foods including health bars, salad oils and the whole seed can be eaten raw or roasted and is sought after as a so-called ‘superfood’.
That is still in train but we thought it would be useful to run through some of the uses to which hemp can be put.
Bear in mind that at the moment most of the usage has been around building products and clothing, but there seems to be a largely still untapped potential for bio-degradable packaging.
Clothing
Hemp’s been used for textiles since time immemorial–samples of hemp fabric in China date back to 8000 BC, though it has certainly had a renaissance of late. Shedding the slightly rough and tough image it once had hemp has broken into the realms of high fashion, has been mixed with silk for lingerie, as well as being applied to more obvious applications where it’s durability is used to best advantage: Providing material for shoes, jeans, and other tough sport clothing.
Food and beverages
About one third of hemp seed’s weight comes from hemp oil, which is both edible but highly nutritious, containing essential fatty acids. The whole seed is about 25 per cent protein, and is a good source of calcium and iron, as well as having more omega-3 than walnuts, all of which point to hemp’s potential for food and as a dietary supplement. Hemp also can be put to good use in iced tea and brewed into beer, fermented into wine, and distilled into other alcoholic beverages. Oh, and there’s hemp milk too.
Paper
Hemp has been used for paper for at least 2000 years, even though today hemp paper accounts for about only 0.05 per cent of world paper production. Even though hemp is a far more quickly renewable and sustainable source of pulp for paper, because of the small number and relatively old age of processing equipment for hemp paper, help pulp ends up being several times more expensive than wood pulp.
Building Supplies
Of all the uses for hemp, even if you only have a cursory knowledge of the subject you’re probably away of hemp fabric, clothing and paper, but here’s one that’s an eye-opener: Hemp provides all sorts of good building materials. You can make it into insulation as companies in the Netherlands and Ireland are doing. It can be used to make engineered building products like fiberboard and pressboard, and even be used to make ‘hempcrete’, a stronger, lighter, and more environmentally friendly version of concrete.
Plastics
Hemp is also a viable feedstock for plastics production. Indeed United States carmaker Ford famously produced a prototype car made out of hemp and soy plastic in the early 1940s. Though it never went into production, with undue influence from chemical giant DuPont playing at least a part, as the photo of Henry Ford taking an axe to the car to prove its durability, shows hemp plastic can be strong stuff. More recently hemp has been made into shower curtain liners, CD & DVD cases, and all sorts of other products.
Fuel
Yes, you can make bio-fuel from hemp! Like pretty much any vegetable oil you can take hemp oil and process it into biodiesel. You still have all the concerns about conversion of land that could be used for food production into land used to fuel vehicles, but the biodiesel process is certainly solid. As cellulosic ethanol technology becomes more commercial viable–something seemingly just over the horizon for a couple of years now, there’s no reason why you could not utilise hemp stalks or other leftovers as a feedstock. Considering all that, it stands to reason that hemp could also be utilised to make liquid fuels that are chemically identical to petrol or diesel as well.
Chemical Cleanup
One of the most intriguing uses for hemp is in cleaning up soil contamination. In the late 1990s industrial hemp was tested at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine to help heal the soil. Because of its fast rate of growing each season, up to 250-400 plants per square metre each up to five metres tall, hemp shows goof potential in cleaning up land contaminated with fly ash, sewage sludge, or other heavy metals, though hemp’s use in phytoremediation on any scale is in its infancy.
