Hemp socks save the planet
The resource we threw away
Up to a hundred years ago, we had a fabulous resource. It grew like a weed, needed very little water, and had its own pest-deterrent so it needed little in the way of tending and chemicals.
From it, we made cloth, sails, rope, oils and medicines from its astounding yield.
Henry Ford was making the body of his factory-line cars – not from metal nor fibreglass – but from a plastic from hemp. He even built them to also run on hemp as fuel.
With America’s banning of cannabis in the 20th century, we lost much of this materials technology, and substituted the need for resources with metal, plastic and cotton – all with their own range of environmental detriments.
But now we are rediscovering this remarkable crop, and finding ever more things that we can do with it.
Australia changed laws in 2017 to enable farmers to grow hemp as a food source, and as such we now find hemp oil as a versatile oil ingredient in many of our breads and other foods – replacing oils that are harder or more costly to produce, or an environmental problem like palm oil.
With this change, the building industry has found a ready source of useful material, and rediscovering its lost applications. The hemp plant, once the oils have been gathered, is ready for use as a strong, lightweight building material much cheaper and easier to produce than plasterboard or wooden beams.
Hemp is also an excellent material for clothing. Easily comparable to cotton, but taking up almost no water at all whereas cotton is well known as being a desperately thirsty crop.
In a country like Australia, where we have plenty of sun and space, but water in short supply, it is astonishing that we didn’t give up cotton many years ago in favour of hemp farming.
And it grows – well – it grows like a weed.
It will grow thick and fast, and on poor quality soil that can’t be used for anything else.
The seeds containing the oil from hemp are often discarded in making building materials or cloth, but here is yet another opportunity: it can be made into diesel fuel.
This diesel is remarkably more environmentally friendly than most other fuel sources, even more than most sources of biodiesel, with another particular advantage in that it is made from a source that is not an edible grain (as compared to corn), so it is not replacing food production.
But there is one area that is more pressing than all the others, and adoption of hemp into this industry will reverse one of our more massive environmental footprints: plastics.
Plastics from conventional sources are generally made from fossil fuel oil and gas, which means that the oil mining industry is required to produce it, CO2 gasses to make it, and there is almost nothing to be done to enable it to break down. ‘Biodegradable’ does not mean what you might think – it just means that it breaks into smaller parts, and quite often doesn’t even do this.
Hemp plastics are not only biodegradable, but compostable; they rot away completely. When made into plastic sheets, hemp can be nothing but soil by the end of the year.
Australia is taking our environmental impact seriously with bans on plastic bags, and that is a great forward step, yet we still consume plastics for all manner of household and industrial purposes. Some of this is preferable if it means preserving food that otherwise goes to waste, or to act as a sterile barrier for our own safety, which means that much plastic that we use is unavoidable.
The more we learn what hemp can do, the more we find how much regular plastic can be substituted out, and replaced with its environmentally friendly alternative. Instead of a field of thick plastic bags, bottles and films, we could see a field of hemp thriving in our naturally dry environment, reducing our plastic footprint with every season.
How can we do this?
We can discover more about hemp, come up with viable inventions and designs for the properties that we find, we can increase the demand for hemp plastics instead of traditional materials, we can encourage our policy makers to invest in new hemp farms, and we can buy clothing made from hemp to make the market viable.
For all the efforts that we make in championing the environmental cause, the least we can do is to buy a few pairs of warm socks.