Can You Build a House With Hemp? | National Geographic

[Music] Some of the most practical uses of industrial hemp in the modern day, of course, are the same as they ever were: building materials, paper, textiles, seed oil, nutrition. Hempcrete, of all the 50,000 known products that we can make with industrial hemp, is my absolute favorite. It is a mold resistant, rot resistant, pest resistant, fire resistant, carbon negative building material.

The most difficult part of pioneering industrial hemp in Oregon is the lack of understanding. People still believe that hemp can get you high when, in fact, there are no psychoactive components to this. So it's a matter of educating people, and we're working on that. Hemp in the United States can be an incredibly viable commodity since the beginning of time.

It’s the only plant that can feed you, house you, clothe you, and heal you. It has hardy fiber, the strongest fibers found in nature. Every part of the plant can be used, you know, from the stalk, the leaves, and the flowers, and the seeds. Each one of those components can be used for thousands of different uses.

Each of these plants will take usually three to four months; they'll reach heights of eight or nine feet. We'll harvest them and then we'll separate out the fibers and the flowers, the seeds, and the rest of the education to make different products. I think in order to launch hempcrete building, to make it real, you have to have a model.

So my vision is to take this house and retrofit it with hempcrete and demonstrate that it's a viable building process. In fact, it's everything that you want in a building. In a wall, it's permeable, so it mediates the humidity in the room. But since the wall absorbs the humidity and the lime that you build with is a high pH, it doesn't mold.

So the wall will hold on to the humidity and disperse it inside or outside as it's needed. Buildings consume 40 to 50 percent of the world's energy, so if we could establish hempcrete building, it's huge. As you get more into the nature of hemp and its abundant properties, that becomes part of the imagination of what I have.

Great building can be the future. Hemp is an opportunity for everyone. We're going to find sustainable uses that we've never even thought were possible, taking advantage of a knowledge base that has never been created because it's been illegal.

And I would hope to see, you know, five years from now, just fields of green. I think hemp has a lot of answers for nutrition, for energy saving, for building. The ideal future is that we have enough hemp growing on the planet in the hands of as many people as find use for it because it has so much to give.