03-07 Hemp

Do not read this chapter unless you can handle excitement. It is about hemp saving the planet. The photo shows hemp, a plant that will grow to a height of 13 feet in 100 days.
We have heard about governments promoting the planting of a trillion trees to absorb the high levels of carbon dioxide in the air. The only problem with trees is the time they take to grow. Well, nothing absorbs carbon dioxide like fast-growing hemp.
What is so interesting is that growing hemp was illegal for such a long time. It was associated with marijuana, which is a sister plant. Another angle is that hemp competes with petroleum-based petrochemicals. And there is no lobby that competes with the fossil fuel industry.
Hard to believe that hemp-based plastic can replace petroleum- based plastic. The photo of a case of bottles is just one of a thousand products that can replace traditional plastic.
Hemp based plastics are biodegradable, which is a problem facing the world with current plastics polluting the oceans and our landfill sights.
I will never forget visiting a remote beach in Fiji in the 1980s and seeing two to three feet of plastic that had been washed up on the shore. The plastic garbage could be seen for miles. This plastic that is floating on our oceans also ends up in the guts of birds and fish.
Perhaps the most exciting product is hemp concrete or what is called Hempcrete. The photo shows a house constructed using hemp concrete. The product has high insulating properties and is about one eighth the weight of traditional concrete. Houses built with Hempcrete do not require as much lumber and are cheaper to build.
Today the big producers of hemp are China, Canada and the United States. If I can make an educated guess, the growth of hemp and the spin-offs will soon sweep around the world.
Part of the magic of hemp as a crop is that it can be grown in weak soil with limited supplies of water. A hemp crop serves to regenerate soil that has been overused for other crops. What a solution to help make small-scale farming economical.
There are an estimated 25,000 products that can be made from hemp, and the photo shows paper bags and cosmetics made from hemp. Then there are textiles, foods, ropes, oils, biofuels and on and on.
How encouraging to realize that although climate change is man-made, there are man-made solutions. It is the global planting of hemp crops and the production of hemp-based products.