TeledyN

The demand for more environmentally-friendly building materials and techniques is at an all-time high and will, in all likelihood, only continue to increase. Since buildings account for 38% of the total carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S., it’s obviously time for us to take a step back and rethink the way our buildings affect the environment. Among the new, greener building materials and techniques is a material that’s not so much new as it is rethought: hemp.

It’s one of the oldest known cultivated crops, and it can be used for everything from textiles to paper to food and beyond. It’s also extremely renewable, with crops maturing after just 14 weeks. And now, you can make buildings out of it. Tradical Hemcrete is hemp held together with a lime-based binder. It’s durable, strong, just as easy to use as conventional building materials, and actually good for the environment: it’s actually carbon negative. Even when combined with the lime binder, the overall product takes more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it puts into it. When a Hemcrete building is torn down, the remnants can be used as fertilizer and the material is fireproof, waterproof, a great insulator, and resistant to rotting (as long as it’s above ground)

Unfortunately, Hemcrete is also illegal

I won't say a word about the impact any widespread use of this material might have on the recruitment to volunteer firefighter brigades; I'll leave that one up to Wayne to answer :)

In one of his first patents, R. Buckminster Fuller invented a technique using straw mixed with lime to create low-weight constructions blocks every bit as strong as the solid-concrete counterparts; because the fibre creates a matrix of bubbles that are surrounded by a geodesic network of non-bubbles, the redundant material not involved in the tensional-compressive strength of the material can be omitted without compromising the material's construction properties. Presumably the same would be true of blocks made with other easily grown but otherwise problematic agricultural waste fibre such as corn stalks, so I'm not precisely certain how much of this press-release on Hemcrete really requires the banned crop.

years ago I also toured a sculptor's shop where she had perfected a technique of infusing concrete with small air bubbles to create the void-space bubble matrics without any need to introduce space-occupying plant fibre.