- What if we could insulate our houses
with cannabis?
Not the kind you use to get high,
but hemp.
- I was laughed at.
People said, "You must be out of your mind.
You're trying to build houses out of a Schedule I substance.
This is never going to happen."
Industrial hemp is a member of the family Cannabis sativa.
It's kind of like the sober cousin
of THC-producing varieties of cannabis.
Today, the definition for industrial hemp
is that it has 0.3% THC or less.
- Hemp has been used around the world for centuries,
from clothing to animal feed to fuel.
But from 1937 to 2018,
it was listed as a controlled substance,
and not an agricultural commodity.
That's all changing now.
- Buildings are responsible
for about 40% of our energy consumption
and about 40% of our carbon footprint.
- Natural building materials
present a solution
that would not only reduce carbon emissions,
but also sequester carbon during their production cycle.
- So in using industrial hemp as a raw material
in our building materials,
we can lower that carbon footprint
because carbon dioxide is actually stored
in the plant stalk itself.
- This all begs the question,
what will it take to once again
make sustainable building materials the norm?
This is Make It Count,
a series on environmental innovations
and the math it takes to bring them to the masses.
- The story of Hempitecture really begins
when I was an undergraduate student studying architecture.
- This is Mattie Mead,
CEO and founder of Hempitecture,
a company looking to bring industrial hemp
back into mainstream construction in the U.S.
- I actually looked at what we did in antiquity
and before the Industrial Revolution,
and I tried to understand
what did people of the past build their houses with?
I had this light bulb, “aha!” moment
when I learned
we had a rich agricultural history and heritage
of industrial hemp cultivation
in the United States.
The explorers found the New World
with industrial hemp sails.
In World War I, most rope was made with industrial hemp.
The Founding Fathers of the United States
grew industrial hemp.
We went from this point of, “Let's build with the Earth,”
to “Let's make petrochemical or synthetic materials.”
And I think we're actually coming back full circle
to our ancient roots of building with the Earth.
If you make your way down the insulation aisle
in Home Depot,
you're gonna see fiberglass,
you're gonna see ROCKWOOL, dense-pack cellulose.
These are really the incumbent insulation products
in which Hempitecture is designing solutions for,
and really against.
- While insulation products like fiberglass, are notably cheap,
they do have a heavy carbon footprint
and release significant amounts of toxic air pollutants
during their manufacturing process.
- HempWool is a non-woven insulation product,
and it's made with some pretty simple ingredients.
We use processed industrial hemp fiber, a binder,
and a fire-retardant.
What we've found is that HempWool
is just better for everybody
that comes in contact with it,
whether it's the general contractor, the laborers,
the installation technicians that are installing it,
to the homeowner.
Everybody is happier when they're around HempWool
because they're not itchy,
they're not worried about toxic off-gassing,
or abrasiveness on their skin.
It's just a better product that people enjoy working with.
- As a natural material,
hemp insulation has a few advantages
over synthetic alternatives.
For example, it’s safe to touch,
requiring no specialist clothing to handle it.
- HempWool is resistant to fungus growth.
It is antimicrobial.
It's not a conducive surface
for the cultivation of mold and mildew.
Even bugs or pests or rodents.
There's no toxicity,
there's no nasty chemicals in the material itself.
- Now that more states are legalizing
the use and cultivation of cannabis plants,
it's not surprising to see that industrial hemp
is becoming easier to grow as well.
That could make it easier
for these sorts of products to scale
and compete with incumbent products.
- Right now, we're actually importing HempWool.
So we are building in the unit cost of,
you know, shipping a container.
$4,500 from point of manufacturer to our warehouse
is built into the cost per square foot.
- Right now, Hempitecture is on track
to compete with companies like ROCKWOOL,
a major U.S. manufacturer of mineral wool insulation.
- Their comparable R-value product
is about $0.90 per square foot,
whereas ours is $1.35 per square foot.
With U.S. manufacturing,
we wanna be actually price comparable to Rockwool.
Fiberglass is notoriously cheap,
and while we do wanna be
somewhat price comparable to fiberglass,
we recognize that fiberglass
is going to have a hard time checking off
the health and the environmental benefit boxes
that HempWool can check off.
- But for HempWool to become price competitive
with ROCKWOOL and eventually fiberglass insulation,
they'll need to scale
and find other ways to bring down costs.
- The more industrial hemp fiber that we're buying,
the lower cost per pound we can get.
The lower cost per pound we get,
the lower cost our insulation can be.
And so we can strive for price parity
with volume and scale,
and that really begins with manufacturing it here in the U.S.
About a year's time from now,
we will be manufacturing HempWool
here in the United States.
Solving some of the biggest problems
that we're facing in our world today
is not easy.
We feel so fortunate
to be bringing more sustainable materials
into an industry
that in a lot of ways lacks sustainability,
lacks choices that are better for both people and planet.
This is really the culmination of my life's work,
and my co-founder,
and everyone on the Hempitecture team.
I wanna be on the forefront of this industry.
It really is an exciting time
for us to address this problem of sustainability
and lack of healthy alternatives in the built environment.