Cannabis: Literally Going Green

Today I would like to talk about industrial Hemp. Industrial hemp is produced from a strain of the Cannabis plant selected to produce an abundance of fiber. This fiber can be turned into an insanely large amount of products, estimated to be around 50,000. Some of the main uses of hemp are in the textile industry, food products, and many others through hemp oil. The importance of hemp is that it is a naturally resilient plant so few pesticides and no herbicides are needed to grow it. The only other chemicals needed are agricultural fertilizers to increase yield which help make hemp a commercially viable crop. I see it as the lesser of two evils. There's also evidence that shows per acre hemp can produce about 10% more fiber versus cotton or flax. Since hemp is a fairly "green" industrial fiber, it's become quite popular with the textile industry as a green fiber source. More about this in a later post though. Hemp has a few great characteristics I've learned such as an ability to purify soil contaminants, in fact it's being used to help clean nuclear waste at Chernobyl. It can also be used in crop rotations to clean up soil and kill tough weeds. The last practical use is in the production of bio-diesel which can be made from hemp oil. After all this I'd like to get everyone thinking about alternative materials that can be used in everyday products and processes. There's lots of innovation going on in this field, and a lot of companies have already made lots of true green products but unfortunately they aren't always well marketed yet so it takes a little digging to find them.