Free Hemp Bound by Doug Fine

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.
    â€œThe 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