Free Hemp Bound by Doug Fine Page A

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.
    â€œThat 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.
    â€œIf 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.
    â€œI 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