At the Ministry of Hemp, we’re a little biased about our favorite plant in the world: hemp. But it seems like everyday we find newer and better ways that it can be used.

One innovation we recently discovered? Scientists discovered how to use hemp fiber in supercapacitor electrodes. A supercapacitor is the lesser-known alternative to traditional electrical energy storage. Right now, a supercapacitor is the second best option for storing power, after batteries. However, more research could change that.

Supercapacitors could be the future of energy density and energy storage, hemp supercapacitors could prove even more efficient than other materials.

Below we’ll introduce you to hemp supercapacitors and how hemp could play a part in our energy future.

WHAT’S A SUPERCAPACITY, ANYWAYS?

The most famous form of energy storage is the battery, an object that contains two opposing electrical terminals separated by electrolytes. When you turn on the power, a chemical reaction occurs between the electrolytes and electrodes, producing electric energy for your device.

Since batteries rely on electrolyes, and electrolytes wear out, all batteries need to be replaced. In addition, batteries take a very long time to fully charge. Today, we use batteries everywhere; in our phones, laptops, and more recently, our cars.

Capacitors work very differently from the traditional battery. In short, a normal capacitor is comprised of two metal plates and an insulating material between the plates called a dielectric. In a capacitor, positive & negative build up on the plates. Rather than electrolytes, capacitors store electrical energy within the plates.

Supercapacitors on the other hand, are different for two ways. Their plates have a “bigger” surface area and the distance between the plates is much shorter. Supercapacitors are usually coated in a porous substance such as activated charcoal. These coatings are called the “supercapacitor electrodes.”

The electrodes serve as more storage on the plates, giving them more surface area to store electricity. Think of normal non-coated capacitors as mops; which can only absorb so much water, and supercapacitors as sponges, soaking up much more water than its surface area. The website Explain That Stuff published a great explanation of supercapacitors in August.

Unlike batteries, supercapacitors charge almost instantaneously and last much longer than batteries. Their biggest drawback, preventing them from being the popular choice, is the amount of energy that is able to be stored within them. Right now, supercapacitors only store a fraction of the power of a traditional battery, but scientists are working hard to find a way around this problem.

THE MIGHTY HEMP-SUPERCAPACITOR

Today’s supercapacitors commonly use graphene, a carbon nanomaterial to create electrodes. But making graphene with hemp based carbon nanosheets costs up to $2000 per gram.

In 2013, Researchers at the University of Alberta National Institute for Nanotechnology found a more economical material in hemp. These scientists discovered how to process raw hurds (the plant’s woody core) into activated carbons through hydrothermal processing and chemical activation. The final product is one that’s able to soak up more electricity, providing better energy capacity.

The solution produces not only a cheaper material — $5000 per ton — but one that performs up to four times better than graphene. Better yet, the solution uses the hemp stems, the part that is often left unused during other forms of hemp processing. With this, the entire plant is used, and no part is left to waste!

Hempcrete building material is one common use for hemp hurds or shivs, the woody core of the plant. Someday, hurds could be used in hemp supercapacitors too.

If this solution can be easily reproduced, it would affect far more than just the electronics industries. Supercapacitors represent a fundamental shift in energy storage.

Imagine if every battery powered object used hemp powered instead! It would mean that hemp would be undeniable in its utilitarian value. Remaining anti-hemp governments would be hard-pressed to keep the plant banned from commercial use.

LEGAL HEMP MEANS MORE HEMP RESEARCH

With the passing of the Farm Bill — making industrial hemp a lawful agricultural commodity in the United States — hemp research is ready to take a big leap. Someday, we could be driving hemp-powered cars and using phones that are powered by hemp!

Not only will consumer products change with legal hemp, but if hemp supercapacitors are adapted to a larger scale, we might see a shift in the infrastructure of the entire country.

The possibilities for this greener, cleaner, and sustainable crop seem limitless! With legal hemp, countless industries stand to benefit.

The post Hemp Supercapacitors Bring Green Tech To A Higher Level appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

Table of Contents

• Why We Need Alternatives To Fossil Fuel-Based Plastic
• Hemp Cellulose Fibers A Good Source For Plastic
• The Pros & Limitations of Bioplastic
• The Biggest Barrier To Hemp Plastic
• Where to Buy Hemp Plastic

You may have heard that agricultural hemp, the non-mind-altering cousin of cannabis (commonly known as marijuana), has dozens of potential uses from clothing to paper.

Since virtually all climate scientists agree that we must replace our dependence on fossil fuels, and given that hemp can even make the soil cleaner, it’s surprising that this miracle crop isn’t in wider use.

When we looked into the topic, we found that hemp is already appearing in some commonplace objects, including cars, and could soon find its way into more. But there are also remaining barriers that keep hemp plastics more expensive and less versatile, for now.

Keep reading to learn more about the future of hemp plastic, or scroll to the bottom to find companies making hemp plastic today.

Alternatives Needed As Plastic Pollutes Water & Land

Researchers found 38 million pieces of plastic waste on one uninhabited island in the South Pacific. That’s just one island.

Not only are the harmful effects of global warming increasingly clear, conventional plastics linger in the environment and can even enter the food chain to detrimental effect on human and animal health.

In one especially shocking recent example, researchers from the University of Tasmania and the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds found 38 million pieces of plastic waste on Henderson Island, an uninhabited coral island in the South Pacific.

Jennifer Lavers, a marine scientist from the University of Tasmania, told The Guardian that evidence of human activity litters the beaches of some of the most far-flung islands in the world, regardless of the year, location, or area of the ocean.Topic

As much as 1.9 million of these tiny particles per square mile, according to a 2014 report from National Geographic, compose the infamous “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.””

Hemp Cellulose Fibers A Good Source For Many Plastics

Some of the earliest plastics were made from cellulose fibers obtained from organic, non-petroleum-based sources.

Seshata, a writer at Sensi Seeds in 2014, reported that hemp cellulose, which contains around 65-70% cellulose, can extract and use to make cellophane, rayon, celluloid, and a range of related plastics. Hemp is a good source of cellulose with particular promise due to its relative sustainability and low environmental impact when compared to wood (which contains around 40%), flax (which contains 65-75%), and cotton (which contains up to 90%).

While 100% hemp-based plastic is still a rarity, some “composite bioplastics” — plastics made from a combination of hemp and other plant sources — are already in use. Thanks to their high strength and rigidity, these plastics are currently used in the construction of cars, boats, and even musical instruments.

Bioplastic Is Promising, But Can’t Solve All Our Pollution Problems

Many plastic products are made from polymer resins, including polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, found in everyday products like plastic bottles. While advocates hope to someday see 100% hemp-based plastic bottles on supermarket shelves, the technology just isn’t ready for prime time.

Coca-Cola and other companies have experimented with 100% plant-based bottles, but they currently produce commercially available products using no more than 30% plant-based materials, while using traditional fossil fuel sources for the remaining portion.

The good news is that many corporations are investing heavily in researching replacements to traditional PET. It’s likely the first company to produce a viable commercial product could stand to earn millions.

Unfortunately, even plastic that’s deliberately designed to be biodegradable can still be a source of pollution. Almost nothing biodegrades in a landfill, and hemp microplastics could still cause problems when introduced to the oceans. Biodegradable plastics need to be sent to commercial composting facilities for efficient disposal, and these facilities aren’t available to everyone. In addition to creating better alternatives to plastic, we’ll still need to create more responsible attitudes toward disposable products.

Cost And The War On Drugs Are Biggest Barrier To Hemp Plastic

While fossil fuel costs are kept low with subsidies, hemp products for the most part remain costly luxury items. The U.S. legalized hemp in 2018, after a few years of research into hemp growing. However, decades of drug prohibition mean we’re still lacking much of the infrastructure needed to grow and process hemp into plastic.

Though hemp requires fewer pesticides and has a smaller environmental footprint than many other crops, growing and harvesting it remains labor intensive. Another drawback is that hemp requires “significant fertiliser in some soils, and also has relatively high water requirements,” as noted by Seshata.

However, hemp prices will undoubtedly come down, and technology improve as hemp growing spreads from coast to coast.

Currently, farmers in the United States are growing hemp mostly for CBD, but they are starting to experiment with other varieties that are easier to harvest for their fiber content.

Will we someday use hemp LEGOs? (It’s probably just hype)

One of the most provocative examples of hemp’s potential plastic future could come from LEGOs, the ubiquitous building block toy. which is promising to phase out fossil-fuel based resin by 2030.

“Hemp might just be the cost effective, environmentally sustainable alternative material that LEGO is looking for,” speculated Emily Gray Brosious in a February 2016 investigation from the Sun Times. However, there’s no proof that LEGO is currently seriously considering hemp.

Whether or not we’re ever able to build a spaceship from hemp bricks, the full promise of hemp plastic remains tantalizingly close, but just out of reach.

Where to buy hemp plastic?

We recommend the following brands:

• Green Spring Technologies

Green Spring Technologies creates hemp plastics used in several projects, including hemp plastic pens that several politicians have used to sign hemp legalization bills.

• SANA Packaging

SANA Packaging focuses on creating sustainable packaging for the legal cannabis and hemp industries. They’ve created “doob tubes” and other containers made from both hemp and reclaimed ocean plastic.

• PF DesignLab

PF DesignLab are cutting edge researchers creating plastic and other composite materials from hemp and other plants. Their 3D-printed hemp bicycle frame, an experimental creation showcased at the NoCo Hemp Expo in 2019, amazed us.

• ExHemplary Life (Hemp pastic drinking straws)

Plastic straws made from hemp and two other plant-based materials. These hemp drinking straws feel identical to regular straws, but they start to biodegrade in 120 days. A great example of a hemp solution to an everyday need. These straws are safer than many other replacements to common straws.

The post Hemp Makes Great Plastic, So Why Isn’t Hemp Plastic Everywhere? appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In late Winter of 2010, I suffered from mysterious sleep sweating which woke me up every hour of the night. Extremely uncomfortable & sweaty, I would disgustingly peel off the blanket to dry myself. Moments later, the sweat would dry and the winter chills would resume. This process of sweating, waking, taking the blanket off and putting it back on repeated for well over a week.

Then one day while chattin’ with my mom in her bedroom, I noticed she was using the exact same blanket. In that moment I had an epiphany: the blanket could have been the reason for my sweating. I asked her if she had been sweating abnormally in her sleep as I had. To my confirmation, she’d exclaimed, “Oh my God! How’d You know?!”

It was that moment that led to the creation of iLoveBad, but for us it’s always been about more than making hemp clothing or a comfortable blanket. We believe hemp can make people’s lives better, as we discovered when we researched hemp blankets.

UNDERSTANDING SLEEP SWEATING & SYNTHETIC FIBER BLANKETS

Beginning that day, my wife and I began researching as much as we could about this night sweating problem.

With just a few hours of google searches, we realized that intense sleep sweating, otherwise known as Hyperhidrosis, was somewhat of a worldwide epidemic that seemed to have no clear answer.  Further, we discovered the blankets we were sweating under was the cause of the sweating because it was made from synthetic fibers (Nylon, Polyester, Acrylic, etc) that are known to be non-breathable, which means that those fibers keep oxygen from entering our bodies through our skin (our body’s largest organ), causing our bodies to suffocate & overheat.

If you own a microfiber couch or a car seat, you can detect the sweating against your skin. Over time, I believe that prolonged exposure to these fabrics causes our bodies to suffer. Even though our bodies are magical in their ability to restore balance, this sweating is extremely counter-productive. Sleep is supposed to restore our bodies, but instead they work overtime!

Realizing all this, we immediately sought for a blanket made with natural fibers. Surprisingly, there were very few options to choose from. Granted, it was 2010 when this was taking place prior to the organic/natural living craze that had swept the world. The blankets we had seen were either too small, too thin, or not soft enough. The only one that came close to what we were looking for cost about $500!

CREATING OUR OWN HEMP BLANKETS

So instead of purchasing something to get by, we decided to make one ourselves. That decision led us to the re-discovery of hemp, a forgotten weed-like plant that was once the staple of American agriculture.

Because of hemp’s renewability (grows rapidly like weeds), versatility (can be used for so many different applications), and environmental benefits (in that it doesn’t require a lot of water to grow as well as pesticides to ward off bugs), it was an easy fiber choice for us to go with.  We then found a local fabric vendor in LA along with a seamstress to help us design & sew the blanket.

We spent about $200 to complete the project and the results were beautiful. Our blanket feels incredibly soft, being that it’s fleece, and magically stopped my mysterious sleep sweating!

We loved it so much that we had to make more for friends and family. The growing excitement over our organic hemp blankets eventually evolved into a business that now includes undies, tees & socks. All our products are comfortable, but they also bring awareness to the incredibly dynamic hemp fiber as well as the many benefits of natural living in general.

WHY HEMP MATTERS: IT’S MORE THAN JUST HEMP BLANKETS & SOCKS

There were a lot of reasons why we could’ve gone with hemp as a business and every single one of those reasons would validate its use.

However, the one aspect that really motivated us to go with hemp was the fact that it was erroneously labeled as a Schedule 1 drug by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Hemp was banned banned as a crop by the United States Government for nearly a hundred years, until 2014.

Further, the U.S. government used propaganda to demonize this harmless plant. The goal of all this was to coerce our society to believe that all forms of cannabis, including hemp, will get you high and do really scary things. Ironically, the government still allowed hemp imports, leading many thousands of dollars to flow overseas annually.

We’ve all been misled at some point in our lives and though it’s not cool, it is what it is. This situation however really bums us out because it reminds us of how unaware & gullible we can be as a society and as individuals. Being unaware doesn’t have to be unhealthy but this lack of awareness led us to judge, criminalize (unjust imprisonment), and destroy the lives of so many people & groups associated with it over the years.

I bring this up not to be sour but rather to remind our collective society to reserve our judgement about everything. Chances are, we really don’t understand them to begin with. We often fear that in which we don’t understand (especially drugs like Marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, and LSD); we all know this.

When you think about it, you’ll easily deduct that fear is the root cause of our insecurities. Fear leads to our anxieties, depressions, and a host of psychological disorders. Likewise, it inevitably stunts creativity! By reserving our judgement about the unknown and perhaps even embracing them as a creation of a higher being, I believe this will drastically mitigate our fear and subsequently dispel the anxieties that comes with it. Again, there are so many reasons to champion hemp back to its glory days and we’re all about them.

But because the most common mental illness in our society is anxiety, we also care to promote the ideology and mental benefits that comes with supporting hemp.

NATURAL FIBERS & ORGANIC HEMP BLANKETS HELP YOU REST

To sum it all up, blankets made of synthetic fibers (such as Polyester, Nylon and Acrylic) are non-breathable.  This blocks our skin from the necessary oxygen it breathes in. Blankets made of natural fibers such as hemp, organic cotton, wool, silk and so forth are more breathable. Natural fibers allow our bodies to effectively collect the oxygen it requires.

Supporting hemp teaches us about the idea of reserving judgement and fear towards the unknown, like hemp and even other currently illegal substances. Consciously raising awareness for unconditional acceptance and love, reducing anxiety, and inspiring limitless creativity

Working together, we can all meet our daily hurdles en route to manifesting our highest aspirations.

The post Hemp Blankets Can Drastically Change Your Life for the Better appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In Episode 65 of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast our host Matt sits down with Shreyans Kokra the CEO of CanvaLoop, an Indian based hemp fiber company, to discuss their new ‘SLOW’ brand hemp jeans Kickstarter. CanvaLoop is using a proprietary process to make high-quality hemp jeans with the same feel as cotton-based denim. Unlike regular jeans, Slow Jeans are made from carbon negative Himalayan hemp harvested by locals.

Himalayan hemp is a cannabis plant growing in the wild, in the majestic and pristine Himalayan ranges of India and Nepal. It has been growing with ‘zero’ human input for over 5000 years — that means it needs no water (except natural rainfall), fertilizers or insecticides. The seeds are also not sowed by man but by nature itself — twice every year. It takes only 90 days to grow and also replenishes the soil it grows in.

In addition, hemp fabric itself offers a number of benefits over cotton fabrics in terms of sustainability, durability, natural antibacterial properties and more. India is quickly distinguishing itself as a leading creator of hemp textiles.

About Shreyans Kokra and CanvaLoop

In 2016, Shreyans Kokra (Founder and CEO of CanvaLoop), set out on a journey to make a truly sustainable fashion material that has all the performance features that a modern human wants. This quest led him to Himalayan Hemp and the current Slow hemp jeans Kickstarter campaign. If funded, SLOW hemp jeans will be available in three classic colors: Black, Indigo and Sky in various fits.

CanvaLoop is an alternative fibers and material science company. They make textile fibers from agri-waste or plants like hemp and banana. Their fibers are eco-friendly, ethically produced and functionally superior. Their mission is to mainstream sustainability by creating alternative fibers.

You’ve got hemp questions? We’ve got hemp answers!

Send us your hemp questions and you might hear them answered on one of our Hemp Q&A episodes. Send your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

Subscribe to our show!

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You’ll be the first to hear about everything going on with our special newsletter plus exclusive Patron content including blogs, podcast extras, and more. Visit the Ministry of Hemp on Patreon and become an Insider now!

Sustainable ‘Slow’ hemp jeans, with CanvaLoop: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 65 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, “Sustainable ‘Slow’ Hemp Jeans”:

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum, and this is the Ministry of Hemp podcast, brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education.

Matt Baum:
Welcome back to another episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast. My name’s Matt, I’m your host. I have talked to a lot of people on this show and learned a ton about hemp, but I don’t think I’ve ever spoken with anyone from India. I almost lined up an interview with some people that were running an Indian hemp conference a while ago, but it fell through due to time constraints. This week, I’m changing that. I have a conversation for you to hear with Shreyans Kokra. He’s the CEO of Canvaloop. Canvaloop is working on bringing hemp jeans to the public. They look just like regular jeans, they feel just like regular jeans, but they are much more ecologically friendly, not in just the way that they’re made, but also when you wash them, and you’re not going to believe where they’re getting the hemp.

Matt Baum:
The Canvaloop process is one of the most carbon negative processes. Not carbon neutral, but carbon negative, and you’ll hear why, that I have ever heard of. It’s incredible what they are doing, and they have a Kickstarter that’s running right now to get their jeans to the public. There’ll be a link for that in the show notes, and I hope you’re going to go and back it, after you hear my conversation with Shreyans Kokra of Canvaloop.

Harvesting wild Himalayan hemp

Shreyans Kokra:
Hi, I am here today primarily because we launched an awesome Kickstarter campaign, called Slow by Canvaloop, which is jeans made out of wild-growing cannabis in the Himalayas.

Matt Baum:
So let’s start there. We noticed you because of the Kickstarter. At Ministry of Hemp, we’re always looking for cool stuff like this. Where are you guys centered out of?

Shreyans Kokra:
Yeah. So we are based out of India.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Shreyans Kokra:
Currently I’m in Surat, Gujarat, which is the Westernmost part of the country.

Matt Baum:
Okay. You are using Himalayan hemp to spin it into a cotton and then make denim jeans, basically. So tell me about Himalayan hemp, because I watched the video and it blew my mind. Tell me a little bit about Himalayan hemp first.

Shreyans Kokra:
Basically, it’s the wild cannabis that grows throughout the mountainous regions of the Himalayas, so when you probably reach there, all the lower and the middle part of Himalayan are full of the wild cannabis that grows there and it is brought up the own lip line in which you have very good quality flood, which is generally used by people as marijuana and also a very, very good quality fiber. So, that is what we found. And it has no known genetics. It grows absolutely in the wild with zero human interference. It just grows when we harvest in three months after you go to the same place, it’s dead at the same height, yielding the same quality of materials. So it’s like nature’s biggest gift to the planet. Every 90 days, you have some amazing things growing and you can just go and collect it.

Matt Baum:
This is not farmed. This is truly wild. Himalayan hemp, like pine nuts. Basically, you don’t grow them on a farm. You just go get it.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes, exactly.

Matt Baum:
Does this land belong to anyone? Or are you allowed to just go take it?

Shreyans Kokra:
So we need permissions from the forest officials…

Matt Baum:
Right.

Shreyans Kokra:
To go and collect it. But since hemp again is such a renewable resource. Within 90 days it grows back to it’s same height and the same….

Matt Baum:
Right.

Shreyans Kokra:
So that forest officials have also started to allow it in the past two, three years, we follow a lot of guidelines. With regards to how much can we harvest? How do we harvest? Especially keeping like the areas has zero infrastructure. And it’s by design that the infrastructure is kept to a minimum because we want nature to survive as it is.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Shreyans Kokra:
So we take a lot of precautions while exercising the extraction, the harvesting, and we follow a lot of guidelines as well. So yes.

Matt Baum:
So it’s carbon zero, like carbon negative essentially because you’re not farming anything. You guys are literally going and picking a weed.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes, exactly.

Matt Baum:
That’s just amazing. Tell me about that though. You said it, there’s not a lot of infrastructure. So how do you get there? Are you like rolling in, on a dirt road, basically into just a forest?

Shreyans Kokra:
So let’s imagine that there are small villages all across the mountain region. And villages are like 10, 15, 20 houses.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Shreyans Kokra:
And so the villagers initially used to only collect the seeds. And sell them in the cities for making a small amount of living. So we basically taught them that fiber is something which is also a very, very useful part of the plant.

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Shreyans Kokra:
Right. And there are ways to harvest and extract the fiber. So we have trained them with the help of some NGOs on the ground. And literally from each village, you get like a hundred kilo or 200 kgs of fiber. And a track goes down, keeps on collecting it from the villages. Some of it comes on a donkey bags. Some of it comes by…

Matt Baum:
This is so bad. [crosstalk 00:05:53] I don’t mean to like… [crosstalk 00:05:59] I don’t mean to like be so mind blown by it. But there just isn’t anything like this in the United States where we’ve been sweet enough to work with local people and not exploit them and not coming in clear cut, therefore for us to hear that you’re going into these smaller areas and working with the people that live there and giving them income as well. I mean, you’re paying them to go out and gather this, right?

Shreyans Kokra:
Yeah. So we actually get a lot of support from the ground because this prevents migration of people from the villages to the cities, which is a big problem in the villages, because there is actually no infrastructure. There are no industries. Then there are no employment opportunities, but this gives them a way to get employed throughout the year without leaving their birthplace place. So this is something that they’re getting a lot of ground support on.

Matt Baum:
And they’re the experts too. They know exactly where it is. They know exactly where to go get it, let them do the work with their expertise.

Shreyans Kokra:
Exactly, exactly.

Creating hemp jeans with CanvaLoop

Matt Baum:
It’s amazing. So you show up, you pick up the hemp from there, you drive it back into town. Tell me about the process now from turning hemp fiber, I’ve always known that hemp fiber can be made into fabric obviously, but jeans, that seems like pretty next level. Can you take me through sort of a broad scope of the process of what happens?

Shreyans Kokra:
Yeah. So basically the parent company Canvaloop, we have a proprietary technique, it’s patent pending by which we convert any sort of a hemp fiber for a plant, a stock part of the plant to a garden light fiber. While retaining the properties of hemp. So the hemp fiber is some amazing deal. Like it being anti UV naturally, anti-microbial all of these properties by [inaudible 00:07:53] we make sure that the amazing properties of hemp stay and hemp gets converted to a very soft fiber. And this is what we have been doing for the past couple of years. But then we thought that there is a gap, we must do something that the consumer actually sees and wants. We understand that a lot of people want to wear hemp clothing, but it’s not available. So that’s why we worked for it, on it for a couple of years, since 2019, we have been working on this project.

Shreyans Kokra:
And so we have kept a lot of thought on sustainability in hemp, throughout the jeans making process. So the way we convert the stock into fiber, again, 100% green be used compressed natural gas instead of coal, which is generally used in the fashion industry for heating [inaudible 00:08:47]. So all the little things that couldn’t be taken care of. Again, right. We have used natural Indigo dyes. So dyes actually gotten from the Indigo flat. So that’s why jeans are called in the indigo. Because jeans technically used to have natural Indigo dyes in the past two, three decades that we are seeing all artificial dyes, which…

Matt Baum:
yeah.

Shreyans Kokra:
Look up river systems and everything. So throughout the process of making the jeans, we have kept sustainability in hemp at the core. So from making the fiber to the thread and then making the final denim, we have kept sustainability in hemp. And yes, it’s a beautiful piece of denim. We have tried to make it as soft as possible. And a lot of tests have been done. We have washed it off 500 times. It stays as it is because of the great durability properties of hemp.

Matt Baum:
So it’s not going to fade like my other jeans and whatnot?

Shreyans Kokra:
It is not because it uses natural Indigo dyes. And then hemp. Hemp is the strongest natural fiber. So we, as an industry have to use hemp’s properties to make products that reflect its true nature.

Matt Baum:
Right. It’s not a matter of turning hemp into something else it’s using hemp to get a final product that you want with the benefits of the hemp fiber itself more…

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes. Exactly. Yes.

The benefits of fabric made from hemp fiber

Matt Baum:
So tell me about that. Let’s talk about the fiber for a second. Because I watched the video and the jeans look amazing, looking at them. I can’t tell any difference. Visually. You said hemp is a very strong fiber and it’s hard to work with and you have a proprietary process to turn it into something that looked like cotton, but it’s not cotton. It’s still hemp.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes.

Matt Baum:
So how does it perform differently when you make it into a denim than say, I am wearing a pair of jeans right now, a pair of raw denim jeans that I paid 75 bucks for, which is a steal for raw denim. That’s pretty cheap. And guess what? A year and a half later, I’ll be real honest with you, there’s a split in the crotch. You can’t see it. Cause I’m at home by myself. So it’s fine right now. But these are $75 raw denim jeans that are supposed to be tougher than normal denim. And they were also made, like you said, there, they were made more responsibly, whatnot. They’re garbage. So explain it like these hemp jeans. How does it stack up to something like raw denim and what are the differences, I guess, similarities and differences I suppose.

Shreyans Kokra:
So similarity, we have worked a lot to not change the feel of the denim. Because we have been wearing denims for so long and they suddenly may give you a very different feeling denim, you will not want to wear it.

Matt Baum:
They will say these aren’t jeans.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yeah. These aren’t jeans today. So we have consciously tried to make the feel of the jeans right how it’s worn as similar to cotton like your normal jeans as possible, like a premium from jeans as possible. The major differences that lie are on the way you can bear the jeans. So jeans are technically made to be worn for longer periods of time without being washed. But the problem with modern jeans nowadays is with a lot of say things coming up in the past few years, you cannot wear them multiple times.

Shreyans Kokra:
They start smelling or they’re sweaty, they’re sticky all of those problems. So, because hemp has a very… Sorry for being a little technically, but yeah, as a very porous, but again, say cross-section, it’s very breathable. So you’ll sweat significantly less. And also it’s naturally anti-microbial. So since there is no bacterial activity, the jeans not get smelly. So again, probably wear them for longer periods of time without actually washing them.

Matt Baum:
So these are jeans that I can wear during the summer is what you’re saying.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes. Summer as well as winter again, because it’s porous, they’ll keep you warmer in the winters and cooler in the summers. So again, these are all amazing properties of hemp that we’re just trying to reflect on the product rate. Hemp is what takes the credit over here. So that is how it’s different. Because of the amazingness of the plant, the variability of the jeans is amazingly better than what you can expect from a normal cotton.

Matt Baum:
So more durable, it’s more porous, so it’s breathable. So it’s, cooler in the summer, warmer in the winter, which is good for guys like me. Cause I’ve chicken legs. And I don’t like wearing shorts. I want to wear jeans all summer. And also it’s UV resistant you said.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes.

Matt Baum:
That’s a natural Part of the hemp fiber is UV resistant.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes.

Matt Baum:
Wow. So it’s not going to fade.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yeah, it’s not going to fade. So it is eventually going to fade like probably after 10 or 15 years, but not when you’re going to wear it for sure.

Matt Baum:
So what about construction? As far as, as sewing it, is it harder to work with than working with denim?

Shreyans Kokra:
It is definitely harder to work with. Especially when we get to the machines, because most of the modern machines are either made for synthetic fibers or cotton. So it’s significantly harder to work with and there are specialized skills required. So not your everyday jeans maker can make a hemp jeans. So, and hemp jeans, there are some jeans on the market which have like a certain percentage of hemp in the denim.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Shreyans Kokra:
But they are not hemp rate. By hemp rate I mean like at least 50% of the fabric should be hemp.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Shreyans Kokra:
Then [inaudible 00:14:49] something made out of hemp. So it’s significantly difficult, but we are getting there. So either could be believe that within a few years within say the next decade hemp is going to be a norm of the fashion industry.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Shreyans Kokra:
So everything will revolve around hemp. It’ll go, it’ll be the next big material. So yes, we are trying to make it happen.

Matt Baum:
So did you guys have to make new machines to work with this because they’re not out there right now. Right? I mean sewing machines and whatnot, and the looms that bring this hemp fabric that you can’t just run this through a normal loom and make the same type of cotton. Can you?

Shreyans Kokra:
So again, the fiber that we make, since we’ve [inaudible 00:15:37] so like cotton. It runs on the regular loom with special assistance. So with some modifications and some special assistance, that’s not your everyday person can done it, but someone who’s trained to run something like this, then definitely run it on the regular machine. So that is the basic. But for us that we are trying to solve to make the adoption of hemp as easy as possible for mainstream fashioning vans as well. Every one on the planet should start using hemp.

The sustainable benefits of hemp jeans

Matt Baum:
I totally agree. That’s why I host this podcast. Now you have a proprietary process that breaks it down into that fabric, more, not the fabric, but the thread, the fiber, if you will, at that point, you’re saying once it’s there, you could ship it into any place that deals with fiber and they can work with it pretty much the same way.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes, exactly.

Matt Baum:
That’s incredible. One of the other things I saw, it takes 7,600 liters of consumed water to make regular denim jeans. And that’s for Americans, that’s over 2000 gallons of water. And 1900 pieces of micro plastics are released into the oceans with every wash. Why are micro plastics coming out of my jeans? I had no idea.

Shreyans Kokra:
So, so a lot of jeans nowadays have a certain percentage of polyester or say like in a [crosstalk 00:17:11].

Matt Baum:
To make it stretchier and more comfortable and…

Shreyans Kokra:
Yeah stretchier and a lot of jeans that you see on the market claim to be more durable. Actually use polyester, which every time you wash like a piece as each piece of this cloth, it releases micro plastics in the water.

Matt Baum:
That makes sense.

Shreyans Kokra:
So, and a lot of again, jeans are nowadays branding themselves as made out of plastic bottles, recycled plastic bottles. But that’s again, not so good for the environment. Because on one hand, you’re recycling the plastic bottle but again from the fabric that is made mainly you’re releasing micro plastics in the world. So it’s like dying by one goal. You’re dying by a… [crosstalk 00:00:17:59]

Matt Baum:
Yeah. It’s death by a plastic bottle or death by a million pieces of tiny micro plastic.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes.

Matt Baum:
So tell me about the water consumption. How does that work? Like slow jeans, obviously, according to what I’m reading here use quite a bit less water. How does that work out?

Shreyans Kokra:
So again, it’s so hemp, as I said, requires no sort of artificial water irrigation to grow. It grows on the lane rainfall that happens or from the ground water.

Matt Baum:
Because again this is not farmed. You’re just going and picking this…

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes. Exactly. And the cotton that is used to make denims, it requires a tremendous amount of water to grow. So one kg of cotton requires approximately 10,000 liters of water.

Matt Baum:
Jesus.

Shreyans Kokra:
And that’s literally just two pieces of jeans. So, and again, throughout the processing, the dying process of the jeans and all of those processes also, there’s a lot of water required and we have, we allow, so we make denims in mills that use completely recycled water. So they recycle their own water. They do not take any new water.

Matt Baum:
So it’s like gray water system.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes, yes. Right. And again, the plant did not require any water to grow. So throughout the whole value chain, we are saving tremendous amount of water.

Matt Baum:
That’s incredible.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yeah. So that is what we wanted to emphasize in the campaign as well, because a lot of people are not aware about the water footprint of that clothing.

Matt Baum:
Right. So let’s talk about…

Shreyans Kokra:
It may be. So by the way, yes.

SLOW hemp jeans on Kickstarter

Matt Baum:
Let’s talk about the campaign for a second. Tell me about the Kickstarter, what you guys have going on. I’ll have a link to the Kickstarter, of course, in the show notes. So people can go throw many of this because we all need to be wearing hemp jeans. And by the way, these are not like boxy farmer looking jeans. These are sexy. These are really good. Do you come from some type of fashion background or anything? We’ll talk about you in a minute I guess. Let’s talk about this, the Kickstarter first. Then I want to talk about you where you came from and how you got this idea. Because I think it’s amazing. So tell me about the Kickstarter.

Shreyans Kokra:
So we presenting slow jeans. These are jeans completely made out of the vial growing Himalayan hemp, and it’s processed in the most sustainable manner possible. And the final output, the jeans better than the normal jeans that we wear, cotton jeans. It’s available in trees, timeless colors like sky, which is like a light blue color, Indigo, which is like a dark blue color and the classic black….

Matt Baum:
Right Very classic American denim jean [inaudible 00:20:52].

Shreyans Kokra:
And all the fits. Right? So if you want a regular fit or a slim fit or a skinny fit. So most of it’s a perception that hemp is a loose that grandpa kind of a thing… [crosstalk 00:21:06]

Matt Baum:
See the hippie and the pajamas with like the poncho on, like I’m wearing clothes bro!

Shreyans Kokra:
So this is like your regular, this is jeans that you can wear to the biggest party in town and people will ask this jeans, what is this jeans? So all the fits, all the colors are there. And I just want to say it out loud that there are two things with it. First it’s made of the wild Himalayan hemp and second it’s insanely comfortable.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Shreyans Kokra:
So this is what we have emphasized on. We did not want to give a product that did not feel good. Not just want to sell hemp because of just it being hemp. We wanted to make a very good usable piece of product. And once you have it, you’ll see the difference for sure.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. It’s definitely jeans, I think are an intensely American institution where everybody wears jeans. It’s just something that like for, I mean, Cowboys wore jeans back in the days, its crazy jeans are something that we go to work in jeans, jeans are something that I mow the lawn in, jeans are something I can take a nap in. So if these are going to be hemp jeans, I’ve got to be jeans. They’ve got to be comfortable. They’ve got to look right. They’ve got to feel right. It’s not like you’re just showing up with hemp pants. So tell me about you. How did you get into this? What is your background?

Shreyans Kokra:
So I’m personally trained in finance. So, but I have a family history in textiles and fashion. So my family has been in the fashion textile industries for 40 years and I wanted to get away from it all. And that’s why I came to the US with a finance background. But then again, I got in touch with hemp and just realized it’s awesome potential. And the actual problem that the textile industry had, I was always aware of that. Right. But I did not really have a solution in mind, but when I got in touch with hemp then its awesome benefits. We were damn sure that this is something that needs to be presented to the normal public. And…

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes. The four years back, we started on from scratch, literally from scratch, working with the plant. And how do we convert it into the best possible fabric for the people?

Matt Baum:
What was it that brought you to hemp? Did you discover it?

Shreyans Kokra:
So when I came to the US a couple of people mentioned it to me. And I’m a very inclusive, curious, kind of a person. So I just go out into it, started reading about it. And interestingly, I was doing a master’s in entrepreneurship.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Shreyans Kokra:
And we had to pitch an idea to work on throughout the year during the course. So this was my master hemp was by all about the masters.

From US college entrepreneur to Himalayan hemp

Matt Baum:
You’re the second person I’ve talked to that did this as their master. They’re like, I was in grad school and I came up with this crazy hemp idea. And they were like, write the paper about it? And now it’s my job.

Shreyans Kokra:
So we started, so during the college itself, you are a group of people. We started a company there in Boston itself. Over the time we did not work out. It was still hemp. We stuck on it. We pivoted a lot of time. And then we finally had this breakthrough with the technology. And today here we are with the jeans.

Matt Baum:
Well, just the kind of thing where you were in the States and you got interested in hemp and decided, okay, my family is from a fiber background. Was there this moment where you just went, Oh my God, there are hundreds of thousands of acres of this stuff back in the Himalayas. I got to go home and use this. Was it just something like that?

Shreyans Kokra:
Yeah, I think, I think you pictured it perfectly. This is exactly what happened. So…

Matt Baum:
I mean that’s [crosstalk 00:25:26] that’s incredible.

Shreyans Kokra:
[inaudible 00:25:25] The United States, a lot of incidentally [inaudible 00:25:34] 16, when I was in the States, the whole movement to legalize hemp and the separation of hemp from Atlanta was going on. Especially in the Boston area. So that movement actually was like a kickstart that we got. And coupled with my textile background back home. Right. Because we also need some sort of an expertise in the product. This is what I also firmly believe, like build the traditional sort of industries get into hemp. It’s not going to go very, very mainstream. So like [inaudible 00:26:11] starts making, say probably some sort of edited drinks with hemp. [crosstalk 00:00:26:16] yeah. So I think they did really good times ahead. So

Matt Baum:
So you, you came to the States and you got your finance degree, and then you were like, Oh, Oh crap. I’ve got to go home. That’s where the action is. You come home with this idea and you come to your family and like, hear me out, hemp jeans, who’s on board? Were they like, yeah. Let’s Absolutely. Let’s pull the trigger over there, like, son, you’re insane. What happened to you in America? How do you pitch an idea like that? Because I’m guessing you’re, and I don’t know, but I’m guessing your family’s textile business was not going out into the woods and finding plants to make clothes out of, how do you pitch that to mom and dad? And were they just on board?

Shreyans Kokra:
So my dad was on board right away, he is like very open. Yeah. So he’s very open. He’s like this, these are your years to experiment in life. And so you can go ahead, you are not making a fool of yourself, then go ahead, try as many things as you want.

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome.

Shreyans Kokra:
But again, since in India we have sort of an extended family system. And there were a lot of people who are not very keen on letting this happen, because there are a lot of regulatory issues in India. And also in the States it’s everywhere…

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure.

Shreyans Kokra:
Just cannot deny it. It’s significantly harder for a person to do business in the hemp industry as compared to any other. So we have under layer of licenses when we import and we export, then we do autumn normal, dry transaction. So people are not very keen. But since I had to go ahead with my dad, we just winged it and…

Matt Baum:
You just got to keep fighting. Right?

Shreyans Kokra:
Yes.

The challenges of working with hemp

Matt Baum:
Sooner or later they’re going to stop telling you. No, because they’re sick of you. This guy won’t shut up. Just tell him. Yes. All right. So what is the government like with hemp in India? Is it… Like you’re in the States, we’re still trying to figure it out. Like, which is ridiculous because our neighbors in Canada have been doing it since the 90s. Europe is way ahead of us. China has been doing this since they figured out they could make fabric out of it. What’s it like in India is a government, a little more green friendly or is it similar to the state?

Shreyans Kokra:
So it’s, it’s changing, the current is like, no one wants to get into this crop. So it’s so controversial, no elected government is like let me take this ahead. So it’s just stuck in us or double limbo, but there are smaller States which are now acting up and legalizing it. Because one interesting thing with India and hemp is it grows in the wild part in the country. So it’s not something that people haven’t seen. It’s just that it was not commercialized. People have seen in spite of the culture. So the ground level acceptance is there, but from a regulatory standpoint, it’s changing slowly. But we are hopeful especially with the United nations, the announcement coming last week with regards to cannabis and we tend to follow the US in order…

Matt Baum:
It does. It sounds very similar to the really stupid stuff we are dealing with hemp here in this country. I’m sorry. It’s like that there. I’m sorry. You guys are following us. It’s embarrassing. We’re bad at this.

Shreyans Kokra:
And even like the States that have made it legal, there’s a lot of issues because we have just copied the guidelines from the European union. Without actually making the guidelines as part of the country. So there are a lot of issues that are there a lot of things in the gray area, but we’re very hopeful that in a couple of years, all of this will work.

Matt Baum:
It sounds like they’re starting to see the benefits. And especially when you have someone like you was who is like, look, I’m not just grabbing this stuff and immediately exporting it to China or immediately exporting it to South America. We are keeping it here. We are using the local population and helping them make money and putting the product together right here and then exporting it. That’s…

Shreyans Kokra:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
very important. Very much. I mean, India, we have definitely for years and years, not just India, but India, Bangladesh, a lot of these smaller Vietnam, even we say, Hey, make our gap jeans, Hey, make our old Navy jeans do it any cheap, crappy way you can think of and then ship it over here. It’s nice to hear that someone is doing it the right way. I’m sorry that you’re fighting to do it. I wish this could just boom, explode. But this is an amazing story. And I think it’s awesome. And I hope anybody who’s listening to this goes and backs the Kickstarter. I want a pair of these jeans, so damn bad. I just want to walk around and be like, I’m wearing hemp jeans and they look awesome.

Shreyans Kokra:
Amazing, amazing. Thank you. We, as a hemp and the cannabis community, we keep talking about how great the plant is, but there’s a lot less action happening. Even if within the community, they start using things made out of hemp. Well, actually everything in the house that we are living in and in the office space that we are occupying. A lot of things can be made out of hemp and they can be better than the current things that we’re using. So we, as a community, if we start using hemp products in general, the industry and the community will become stronger. And I think the way forward for the industry is to start supporting each other first and then looking outside…

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Shreyans Kokra:
For more approval.

Matt Baum:
Because we can’t just continue to just cheerly do each other. That’s not going to change anything. We’ve got to keep screaming to everybody else. Hey, we can make wood out of this. Hey, we can make jeans out of this hey. We can make plastic out of this. And Oh, by the way, you have an endo cannabinoid system in your brain that wants this as well. I mean, it’s very important. Thank you so much for your time and thank you for what you’re doing. I truly think this is just incredible. And I hope this explodes. I hope you’re so famous, it’s stupid. And sometime next year, they’re going to be like, Oh, you got to hear when he was on that ministry of hemp podcast before anybody knew him.

Shreyans Kokra:
I definitely hope this happens, thank you so much.

Matt Baum:
Thanks to Shreyans for talking with me. It was going on midnight, his time when we had this conversation. So thank you for staying up late to talk to a lazy American that didn’t realize what time It was there. And also the links to the canvaloop Kickstarter are going to be in the show notes, please go check it out, watch the video. I think we’ll have it in the post for the podcast as well, but it’s truly incredible what they are doing. And he’s right. Hemp is one of the fibers of the future and it’s just a matter of time. And it’s really cool. Does he early pioneers? And when I say early pioneers, that’s ridiculous. Because we’ve been making hemp clothes for thousands of years, but it’s coming back in a big way and it’s really cool what they’re doing. So we owe it to support people like Shreyans in Canvaloop. Speaking of the show notes here at the ministry of hemp, we believe that a more accessible world is better for everyone. So you can find a complete written transcript of this show in the notes as well.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
Thanks again for spending some time with me today and learning about hemp and thanks to everybody that supports this podcast, by going to patron backslash ministry of hemp and becoming a ministry of hemp insider, it is an amazing way to keep this information coming and here, podcast extras to get a look at early posts before they go up on the site and all kinds of other extra stuff we’ve got T-shirts, we’ve got stickers, all kinds of cool stuff. It really does help. And you know what else helps leave me a review for this show, wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s a star rating or even a written review, it helps so much to bump us up in search algorithm. So other people can find show. Speaking of the show, next week, I will be talking to two of the gentlemen that started Santa packaging. They are one of the largest hemp plastic packaging companies in the United States.

Matt Baum:
And it was an awesome conversation. So be sure to tune in for that, if you need more ministry of hemp in your life until then head over to ministryofhemp.com, we have got our holiday gift guide. The holidays are coming and you have people that would love all kinds of hemp presents to check out our holiday gift guide. And if you didn’t hear it last week, check out our round table discussion that we posted on the show here, where I spoke with drew and kit and Deseret, the whole ministry of hemp gang. And we talked about hemp and cannabis on the ballot in the 2020 election. It was a great conversation and I hope you had a chance to check it out. You can also follow us on all our social media at backslash ministry of hemp at ministry of hemp or all over the place.

Matt Baum:
And we’re always kicking out great hemp education links. And maybe you have questions about this episode or CBD or anything hemp related. You can call us (402) 819-6417 and leave your message with your question. We will play it on a future show. We do these Q&A shows where myself and other people from ministry of hemp answer your questions. It’s a ton of fun. And I would love to hear from you. You can also email me matt@ministryofhemp.com with your question or shoot me an MP3 to that email too. Regardless we want to hear from you. It’s your show. Let’s hear your questions. I got to get out of here. And I like to do it the same way every week by saying, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others and make good decisions. Will you, this is Matt Baum with the ministry of hemp signing off.

The post Hemp Jeans From Wild Himalayan Hemp, With Shreyans Kokra of CanvaLoop appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In episode 63 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, our host Matt Baum talks about biodegradable hemp plastic with Carolyn Virostek, a distributor for Exhemplarylife.com.

Carolyn talks about the benefits of biodegradable hemp plastic vs other plastics. Some plastics that creators claim are more environmentally friendly actually break down into microplastics. The conversation covers single-use plastics like the hemp straws and how hemp and other plants like flax can be used for much more than making smoothies. Matt also mentions this Stanford University report on plastic straws at the beginning of the episode.

About Exhemplary Life

Exhemplary Life was created out of a desire to advocate for hemp and products made from this indigenous plant. The hemp flowers, seeds, and stalks can make many products such as clothing, shoes, accessories made with Hemp fibers for more natural and eco-friendly products. The oils of the plant can be used for food and extracts as a huge health benefit of our bodies Endocannabinoid System.

Part of the advocacy is in educating people about the needs and health benefits of hemp products as well as its eco-friendly sustainability. While educating people about the benefits of hemp people would ask us where they could get quality hemp products. Their plan is to provide more products made from hemp as the industry develops new items. Since the U.S. has finally made hemp legal to grow and cultivate we will see more and more hemp goods being made available. At first, they’ve focused on providing high-quality clothing, salves, lotions, extracts, oils and foods with more products added over time.

You’ve got hemp questions? We’ve got hemp answers!

Send us your hemp questions and you might hear them answered on one of our Hemp Q&A episodes. Send your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

Subscribe to our show!

Be sure to subscribe to the Ministry of Hemp podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podbay, Stitcher, Pocketcasts, Google Play or your favorite podcast app. If you like what your hear leave us a review or star rating. It’s a quick and easy way to help get this show to others looking for Hemp information and please, share this episode on your own social media!

Become a Ministry of Hemp Insider and help spread the good word!

If you believe hemp can change the world then help us spread the word! Become a Ministry of Hemp Insider when you donate any amount on our Patreon page!

You’ll be the first to hear about everything going on with our special newsletter plus exclusive Patron content including blogs, podcast extras, and more. Visit the Ministry of Hemp on Patreon and become an Insider now!

Hemp Straws And The Sustainability Of Hemp: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 63 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, “Hemp Straws And The Sustainability Of Hemp”:

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum, and this is the Ministry of Hemp podcast, brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education. Welcome back to the Ministry of Hemp podcast. And I know we’ve been talking about hemp plastic a lot on the show, but there’s been a lot coming out about hemp plastic, and bio-plastics, that’s really exciting, today on the show we’re going to talk about some new completely biodegradable hemp plastics that are out there that hopefully are going to take the place of a lot of single use plastics on the market right now. But before we get to that, let’s talk about straws for a second.

Matt Baum:
Did you know that almost 500 million straws are used a day in the United States, and of those 500 million I’m going to say close to a 100% only get used once and then thrown away. Now this plastic finds its way into the ocean, into our landfills all over the place. And it’s not good for you. It’s not good for animals. It’s not good for the planet. It’s not good for anyone.

Matt Baum:
And while 500 million straws can sound like a crazy, huge number. And it is, that makes up for less than 1% of plastic pollution, which is sheer insanity. This information is coming from an article from stanford.edu, and I’ll have a link to it in the show notes, but it blows my mind. Now the good news is, there are States like Washington that have banned plastic straws. McDonald’s is moving away from plastic straws, Starbucks also did the same thing this year, and look, I don’t think paper straws are the answer either because they’re awful.

Matt Baum:
They just melt, and cutting down trees to make paper straws is not an answer. Now, there are people out there making a completely biodegradable hemp plastic. And today we start off talking about straws. My conversation today is with, Carolyn Virostek. She’s the distributor for exhemplarylife.com, who deals in all cool hemp products, including hemp straws.

Matt Baum:
And we just happen to give some away on our Instagram and at the end of the show, stay tuned because I get to reveal the winners on the end of the show. Super fun. Right? And I’m going to have a coupon code for you guys for 25% off your purchase at exhemplarylife.com. So, stay tuned for the end of the show for all of that, but first here’s my conversation with Carolyn about hemp plastic, hemp straws, and how we can make a more responsible and biodegradable plant-based plastic.

Hemp straws and the problem of plastic pollution

Matt Baum:
Carolyn, before we get into it, we’re going to talk about, I don’t even know what to call it quite honestly. You sent me these straws, and I looked at them and I said, “These look like plastic. They feel like plastic, when I drink out of them it feels like plastic in my mouth, but it’s not plastic. What am I holding here? What did I drink through the other day?”

Carolyn Virostek:
They absolutely do look like plastic. They feel like it, they don’t hold up as long as plastic, which is what the purpose of them is, because we don’t want them to last a 100-1000 years, our environment and our animals don’t need that. They are hemp-based product made out of hemp biomass. And then, we have two other products that we don’t actually divulge it’s proprietary, but none of it is PLA, which is something that a lot of plastics end up using if they’re trying to be compostable or biodegradable.

Carolyn Virostek:
Especially in the hemp industry, or really in a lot of the plastic industry where they’re trying to come up with alternative to fossil fuel plastics. They will use PLAs, sometimes a PHA, but the PLAs are the biggest ones, which, I don’t want to sound like I’m negative against PLAs, they’re great because they are a plant base, but they still have their issues with how they break down, how they need to be composted and broken down in the right environment.

Matt Baum:
Sure. So, real quick, can I ask you, what is a PLA? I have no idea, or a PLH? No clue.

Carolyn Virostek:
It’s an organic based polylactic acid, that is used as a binder within plastics as we call them. And plastic really is a term really basically, of anything that has the malleability that we can use in different products where it’s going to hold up under different circumstances. We have hard plastic, soft plastic, et cetera, but PLA is going to be an organic compound that is used as a binding agent.

Matt Baum:
Same with PLH?

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. A lot of times it’s made out of corn starch, sugar cane, and now they’re even starting to make it out of other products too, even coconut shells. So PLAs can be made from many different products.

Matt Baum:
But in these PLA products, they still have plastic in them. They’re still petroleum-based plastics that these are incorporated into?

Carolyn Virostek:
No. That’s the difference, PLAs won’t have the petroleum base. It is an advantage to use the PLAs, because we’re not using the petroleum-base, because that’s a completely different animal. And that’s what we’re trying to get away from, because petroleum-based takes so much more energy to produce, actually just to extract from the earth, to refine it and then produce it.

Carolyn Virostek:
That in itself is toxic to the environment as well as the actual product. And then what do you do with that product when you’re done with it? After drinking that water bottle that you just had for maybe an hour, what are you going to do with it? And what’s going to happen to it? Or you throw it in the garbage and it’s there for 1000 years.

Matt Baum:
Right. Aliens, discover it after human society has been wiped from the earth and go, “Well, I wonder what they did with this trash.”

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. Why did they make these? What’s this purposed for? It really does make you think about, “Well, do we really need all these plastics all the time? And how long is it going to be in our environment?” And we’re finding that it’s not good, that we are finding huge portions of it on islands where humans have not even inhabited, but here these plastics are washing up on shores.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. And like rafts of plastic that gather in the middle of the ocean and stuff, it’s insane, it’s absolutely insane.

Carolyn Virostek:
It is. And we just keep making more and more plastic, because the oil industry puts a lot of money into it and they want to keep it going.

Matt Baum:
It’s cheap too. So why not?

Carolyn Virostek:
It’s very cheap according to them. Now that brings into another conversation I have, we can say, “Yeah, it’s cheap, plastics are cheap.” And that’s the comparison between our straws, is that, our straws are more expensive than plastic. And that’s one of the issues that people have with it. And my comment as well, “You can either pay for it now, or you can pay for it later.”

Carolyn Virostek:
Because when you use plastics that are oil-based, first of all, you do pay for it. In that you’re extracting a finite material from the earth. We can’t make more of that. Whereas hemp, we can grow it every couple of months, every few months we’ve got a whole new crop.

Matt Baum:
Exactly.

Carolyn Virostek:
And it also is great for the environment. We’re not causing more toxicity by growing hemp, whereas oil, how it’s even processed and refined that takes toxicity, puts toxic waste into the environment. So right then and there, we do want to look at the cost to the environment, just in bringing it to the market. And then when we have a product just like in plastics, in our bottles or our hemp straws, one, we find it out in the rivers or out in the creeks or wherever we are.

Matt Baum:
Or in the bellies of dead animals even.

Carolyn Virostek:
Exactly, in the ocean, and then we’re losing animals because they’re eating it. It goes back to where we find the material, we have to go and get it. You’ve got to bring it in from the trash that it is, the pollution that it is. Then we have to find a way to process it. Process it into a new material to make something new.

Carolyn Virostek:
If we do that, a lot of times, many countries still burn all their plastics. So we’re increasing the toxic waste into the environment by burning it. But for them, it’s a lot easier to be able to just burn it than to actually process it into something new.

Matt Baum:
It’s cheap, right?

Carolyn Virostek:
That’s what they say, it’s cheap.

Matt Baum:
You can put those blinders on and just say, “Well, yeah, but it’s less expensive, and it does the job. And I don’t have to think about it when it gets thrown away.” But that’s not the case. Just like you said, we are pulling oil out of the earth. We are then doing something toxic to the environment to create this plastic straw that you use one time, you literally use one time and then you throw it away. And then the earth pays for it for 1000 damn years.

The problem with PLAs

Matt Baum:
We know we’re trying to get away from that, and PLH is a step better, but it’s not as good as what’s being used in these hemp straws. Now, what is the difference? You said PLH, doesn’t quite break down the same basically. It’s less durable, or it’s more durable, before we get into what’s in the hemp straws, What is the problem with PLAs?

Carolyn Virostek:
The problem with that is, and even some chemists are still debating on what it is, as far as, are PLAs biodegradable, or are they just degradable?

Matt Baum:
So we don’t even know?

Carolyn:
There’s debate, you can get one scientist. “Well, no, it’s absolutely biodegradable.” And another one will go, “It breaks down, but it’s not really biodegradable.” If we even look at that, if I can just come up with a biodegradable versus compostable, that’s the other thing, if something is deemed certified compostable, it’s also biodegradable, but something that’s biodegradable is not compostable.

Matt Baum:
Yes. Not all things that are biodegradable are compostable, but all things that are compostable are biodegradable?

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. And with the PLAs, they do debate on that. And we can say it does degrade, but it just takes longer. So PLAs can biodegrade in, as I’ve seen it as short as four years, but the average is about 80 years. So again, it will break down and it doesn’t have the toxic residue that an oil-based plastic will, if it were to break down, but it still has a cost to the environment, because these PLAs as a plastic, quote-unquote, “Break down into smaller finer materials, which then become microplastics.”

Carolyn Virostek:
And those microplastics are what we’re finding in the billions in the oceans and our creeks, and even in the glaciers, and even at the top of the mountains where it’s actually raining and snowing down in those particles, they’re such fine particles. We do find plastic bottles, plastic bags, in the stomachs of the sea life.

Carolyn Virostek:
But we’re also finding these microplastics in the smaller forms. They can’t eat a big bottle, but they’re still eating these microplastics thinking that they’re food, and they’re either dying from it or they’re carrying it on to us. So even our urine, they’re finding huge amounts of microplastics in our system.

Matt Baum:
So does it break down? Yes. But it breaks down just into really small plastic. It doesn’t break down into something that is combustible even, or compostable. It’s just really, really little pieces. And that’s not an answer either. We don’t want that.

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. With compostable, something that’s compostable, that’s going to break down and may compost. Then we can use that, that’s something usable, but when it just breaks down into microplastics, into smaller parts of it, it’s not usable and it’s not ideal.

Matt Baum:
And still dangerous.

Carolyn Virostek:
It’s still dangerous. I don’t want to make it out to be this horrible thing, because it’s a lot better than using the fossil fuels, but we still have to move a little further along to make it the right product.

Hemp straws & how they’re made

Matt Baum:
So tell me about the hemp straws then. What are these made of, and how does something that feels so completely plastic, both in your mouth and in your hand and does the job, how is it completely compostable?

Carolyn Virostek:
Well, the biggest thing is the plant, hemp. You and I both are advocates of the hemp plant.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely, it’s why we are here.

Carolyn Virostek:
Because, it can do so much for us. How many plants do we know that you could use the seeds, the fiber and the pulp, and make so many products? One of the big taglines is that, hemp can make 25,000 products. Well, that’s actually a disservice. I think it can make a lot more than 25,000 products.

Matt Baum:
Oh yeah. Totally agree.

Carolyn Virostek:
Hemp is a cellulose based product as a plant, it has cellulose just like sugar, just like the sugar cane would, even has cellulose. These are products that are used in quote-unquote “Plastics to make material.” Because, cellulose is the binding agent. It helps to support that. And as you look at hemp, the stalks and the biomass, it’s very fibrous, it’s much more fibers than wood, and that’s what gives us its strength too.

Carolyn Virostek:
If we can make hemp into say, a fine powder, and compress it under heat with some other elements that are plant-based too, is what we use. Those can actually form a very strong material in a very simple way. It can be complicated, but then it can also be very simplified. You can watch YouTube videos, where people make this in their kitchen, where they take cornstarch and water, heat it up and they make a little plastic out of it. So, hemp that’s what we’re doing also, is we’re taking hemp and making it very fine powder, like a starch and adding other materials to help bind it. And then it gets heated up and formed into straws.

Matt Baum:
So, it literally melts basically, and the cellulose works with the other binders and holds it together. And at that point you can form it just like plastic? You put it around a dowel and it becomes a straw?

Carolyn Virostek:
Exactly. Exactly. They do make them into little pellets, just like they do with the plastic, so that they can put it into the extruder machines, so they don’t have to adapt the machines for the product, but the product gets adapted for the machines. With that, then the pellets are made very small, just so they can be added to the machine. And then they get melted within that process, going through the extruder and that’s what helps to make them, now there are many products that can be made out of it too. And that’s in the futures bags, cups, you name it.

Matt Baum:
Sure. Sure. Now let me ask you, is clear a problem. Because I’ve heard in hemp plastics clear is very difficult, because of the nature of the plant green and brown, super easy?

Carolyn Virostek:
Exactly, super easy.

Matt Baum:
But clear seems to be a problem still?

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. Yeah. You can’t really do a clear straw, but you can do an opaque straw or we do add colors and the colors that we add are standard colors that we are able to use in the industry that are, I’m not gonna say completely plant-based natural, but they are more natural. They are able to use them to color it into any color that you need. But people do like the natural color as a hemp straw though.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. It makes sense that it’s green. It comes from hemp. I like it. It differentiates it, if nothing else. Let me ask, I take my hemp straw, I drink my drink, I throw my hemp straw away or I compost it. I actually have a compost pile in my backyard. Take it out, throw in the compost pile. How long before it’s gone?

Carolyn Virostek:
Well, it depends on your compost really, because anytime you… I would love to say that every single one’s going to compost in a certain time, but it’s going to be different. In fact, industrial composting is going to be the fastest and the best because they’re going to control the oxygen in there. They’re going to control the heat and even the microbes and all the little critters that are going to go in there and eat it up to make it into compost. How that’s going to be in your compost, is going to vary. How’s it going to change from day to day, let alone month to month, with all the different seasons.

Matt Baum:
Sure. So, let’s say industrial compost, a best case scenario?

Carolyn Virostek:
We’ve seen them biodegrade completely in 120 days.

Matt Baum:
That’s amazing. That’s like paper.

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. When we look at the compost, there’s really nothing that’s in there. There’s no residue. That’s the other great thing, is that a lot of times you will find some residue from that because of some of the materials that they use gunks up the systems, and facilities that are compostable facilities are very picky about what they allow in, because it will mess up their whole system.

Carolyn Virostek:
And so, you have to be certified through the BPI world compostable and biodegradable. They will give you certifications on your product, which we do have. In fact, here in Pittsburgh, we have a company that does do the compost, and they actually go around to the restaurants and bring in all their compostable material, and they found our straws and they contacted us because they said, “Are you guys really compostable? Can you share that with me?” And I said, “Yes, it is.” And gave him the information.

Carolyn Virostek:
Because he said, “Otherwise we have to pull it out.” Because it’ll just gunk up the system. I said, “No, you really will not have an issue with it.” And that’s something that you can’t say about every product that is a PLA, and even PLAs if you send them in the landfill, people think, “Oh, we’re in the landfill, if it’s biodegradable it will breakdown.” Actually it won’t, because landfills seal them up and you have no oxygen, without oxygen it’s not going to break down, and it can actually create more methane gas. It’s same as a plastic, if it’s trying to break down in that environment, because it’s not the appropriate environment.

Matt Baum:
So, I say it’s like for a month and we say no more food garbage, your food garbage goes over here. And we’ll compost that because it’s so much methane builds up when you seal it and put it away in an airtight coffin. You’ve basically created a bomb, a methane bomb at that point. Is this different than other hemp plastics? Because, I’ve spoken to some people recently on the show and brought up that like, “Oh yeah, I just did an interview with some people about hemp plastic and stuff.”

Is hemp plastic really sustainable?

Matt Baum:
And a couple of them are like, “Oh, hemp plastic? Huh. You know about that?” And I was like, “Well, I don’t follow. What do you mean?” And they’re like, “It’s a lot of hemp filler, and it’s still a lot of plastic.” Is this different than that? Have you encountered that elsewhere? And are they lying to me? Because, I’ve bought some hemp plastic products and felt really good. Like, “It’s made of hemp plastic.” Does that mean that there are different levels of this, and you’ve got to watch out for it basically?

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. If you look at say the 3d printers, which is a lot of hemp plastic, which again, I think it’s great that they’re using hemp and they’re wanting to make things compostable and biodegradable. But a lot of them are going to be with a PLA or PHA, which is another one too, which is actually really good. I think it would be better if we did start using PHAs more than the PLAs, but they’re still not using that.

Carolyn Virostek:
But a lot of the 3d plastic filament, I’ve not been able to find one that does not have PLAs in there. Now, they do have different components even, or I should say substance, or where it might be 25% hemp, 40%, 60%. There’s very few companies that do anything to 90, to a 100%. Now there is a company that is in France and even in Canada, where they have really a much higher percentage of hemp in their plastic.

Carolyn Virostek:
Again, we use that term. But in their filaments, they do have a much better process that they’re using and they’re trying to break into the industry and they’re doing well with it, but there’s still very few companies that are doing that.

Matt Baum:
What can you look for? I’m just curious. Is there a question that you can ask? Is there something you can look for, when you see someone that is working with hemp plastic or some way? What do I ask them to make sure… I understand it’s good that they’re using any hemp as a filler, because less plastic better, but if it’s just a filler and there’s still plastic in it, or there’s these PLAs in it and whatnot, what is the question we should be asking to make sure that we’re getting responsibly made hemp plastic, that’s going to break down and it is compostable? Is it just as simple as saying, “Hey, is this compostable?”

Carolyn Virostek:
That’s one of the questions, yeah. “Is it compostable?” And how long does it take? And also, is it a PLA? If it’s a PLA, then we know that it’s going to break down into microplastics and it’s going to take longer for it to break down, and it’s not going to be compostable it’s biodegradable, but not compostable.

Matt Baum:
And they’re going to know, if I say the word, “Hey are their PLAs in this?” They’re going to go, “Oh, this guy knows what he’s talking about.”

Carolyn Virostek:
Well, they’re going to say, “Yeah, there are PLAs, but it’s compostable.” And that’s okay. Yeah, it is. I would much rather have a 25% hemp than a no hemp, and 25% with PLA than an oil based fossil fuel that they’re using.

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Carolyn Virostek:
That would be one thing, “Are you using any fossil fuels?” Because some will still even use PLA with some fossil fuels to bind it up, to make a little bit stronger, but then we changed the compostable ability as well as the bio-degradability.

Matt Baum:
That’s exactly the subject that was brought up with the person I was speaking with, who I’m not going to name because they asked me not to, because they’re like, “I don’t want to mess up anyone else’s good thing.” And he’s like, “But a lot of these people that are working in hemp plastic now are literally just incorporating it into old fashion oil-based plastics and using it as a filler.” Which again, better but not the answer, not what we want.

Matt Baum:
The idea is to move to something closer to these hemp straws that like you said, “Reduce in to powder, you’re adding some…” And I’m not sure, I’m not even me to look for the scientific terms, what you add to make a bind, but you heat it up and boom, we have plastic. What is the future of this? Where does this go? Is this something that you… The straws I think are so important, because if you look at single waste plastic, that is the biggest form of plastic waste out there.

The future of hemp straws

Matt Baum:
It’s not children’s toys, or even industrial plastics, it’s single use plastic. So, obviously like you said, these are a little more expensive, but the idea behind it, is it’s more responsible. Are people responding to that? Are people excited about this? Are people willing to spend a little more? And do you think this is something that is going to catch on and start to get major plastic producers to pay attention?

Carolyn Virostek:
Absolutely. There’s an excitement about it, because of the property of hemp, as well as not having the PLAs. And it is more expensive. So it is something that we have to try to get them to understand, that you either pay for it now or pay for it later. You can either pay for the straws as a cheap component and then pay for it later in the processing of having to get it off the beaches and out of the waters, et cetera, or you pay a little bit more now and then that worry is less.

Carolyn Virostek:
We still have to be responsible in how we dispose them and how we compost them. But it’s something that, if it does end up in the ocean or in the waters, it’s going to break down and we don’t have to be so concerned about the toxic residue that it might leave behind.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. It’s perfect.

Carolyn Virostek:
It’s very exciting. We have a lot of people excited about it. I will say the environment right now with the pandemic, everything’s shut down. It’s cooled things off, but what it has done also is made people more excited about realizing we need to do something now, this is not something that we need to put off for five years or try to work it into the budget because again, we either pay for them now, or we pay for that cost later. And I think right now people are really excited about having something that they know is going to break down and is not going to linger in our environment for years and years.

Matt Baum:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but sounds it like, I would guess anyway, that the price is only high because there aren’t a lot of people making this stuff yet. And as more people get into the business of making hemp plastic, that price is going to come down. Is it just a matter of producers? Because it seems like every aspect of the hemp business at present, and not just at present, but in the last we’ll say four years, their biggest issue has been finding producers to do the work.

Matt Baum:
Basically, we’ve got farmers, that’ll grow it and that’s great. But what happens next? Whether it’s going to a place that’s going to extract CBD, or take out the fiber or grind the seeds, is this just another case of, “We just need more people doing this?”

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. And knowing how to do it. Absolutely, because even though we are farming a lot more hemp than we were even a year ago. And a lot of companies say we’ve got so much biomass that we don’t even have the buyers for it. What it is, is that they actually don’t have the equipment or the know-how, to process it the way that they want it to, and that machinery is millions and millions of dollars.

Carolyn Virostek:
They’re bringing it out, but we’re in the growing pains, of learning how to use this product and how to use it in the best way that we can environmentally and being able to process it without any waste too. Because, we really can’t use the entire plant. We just need to know how and have the proper equipment. So, we’re in a big learning curve right now, growing pains with that.

Matt Baum:
How far off do you think we are? And just call your shot. No, one’s going to hold you to this. No, one’s going to look at the podcast in five years and be like, “Nice call.” But how far off do you think we are before, I go to Starbucks and I get a hemp straw?

Carolyn Virostek:
I’m hoping a year to two years.

Matt Baum:
Wow. Really?

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. That’s absolutely my hope.

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome.

Carolyn Virostek:
I will say that we had really big clients on the list, until the pandemic shut everything down. Really big companies similar to Starbucks. So it’s on the cusp there. People are wanting and ready. It’s just now we’ve we need the economy to just support it too.

Matt Baum:
So we’ve got the machines, we know how to do it. We’ve got people growing it, now it’s just a matter of showing people. Not only is this the responsible thing to do, it’s the right thing to do. And it’s a cost-effective thing to do, if we put a little know-how into it and that’s basically it, that’s our biggest issue. Just getting them to try it more or less.

Growing hemp for sustainability

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. Yeah. And then it will come down to a point where we do need more farmers for that biomass, because one farm is not going to be able to supply the biomass for Starbucks.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Carolyn Virostek:
That’s our hope, is that we have so much demand for it that we need more farmers to be able to supply that biomass.

Matt Baum:
It also seems like there’s a lot of farmers that went into this, with the CBD gold rush idea where like, “I’m going to grow hemp and sell to CBD weirdos, and they’re going to turn it into all kinds of fake drugs for hippies and I’m going to make money.” And then they went, “Oh, that market’s not quite there.”

Matt Baum:
And in the meantime, the fiber farmers weren’t as plentiful. Because again, it seems like they’re won as many, I want to say, industrial companies that were working in hemp fiber, is that part of the issue too? Just convincing people that like, “Hey, it’s not all CBD. We can grow this for fiber and seed as well?”

Carolyn Virostek:
It’s that as well as the machinery. In order to break the hemp down into the product that you need it for, whether it’s for clothing or for, quote-unquote “plastics.” It’s having the correct machinery to break it down. And that I think is what has slowed a lot of companies down into processing it. The hemp is the passion of mine. I really do think that we should be using it more. I feel I know maybe a half a percent of what we could know about the plant, but I think we’re still learning.

Matt Baum:
That’s the most exciting part though, right?

Carolyn Virostek:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
It’s like, how many other plants out there that farmers in the United States, in Iowa, in Nebraska, in Kentucky, in Colorado are growing right now where we’re like, “Oh my God, there’s so much more we could do with this.” What can we learn about this? It’s like, if we found out, like, “Look at that corn, we can build skyscrapers out of it.” Who knew?

Carolyn Virostek:
Who knew we could refill a car out of the corn oil?

Matt Baum:
Right. It’s crazy.

Carolyn:
We can do it, but are we doing it? That’s the same thing with hemp. We can make all these products. Why aren’t we?

Matt Baum:
Exactly.

Carolyn Virostek:
One, it is the infrastructure is not there. Also, we still have regulations that limit what can be done, in some States they’re not allowed to use the biomass or the fibers or anything for animal bedding, even just simple as that, or animal feed.

Matt Baum:
Let alone animal feed. They won’t even let them lay around in it for a fair. Like, is the cow going to get stoned? Come on, it’s ridiculous.

Carolyn Virostek:
Those things just make you question like, “Really, why aren’t we using it more?” Just like flax, that’s a plant too that can be used, and my great, great grandfather brought it over from Ireland in the 1850s to Canada. And I didn’t realize this until a few years ago when I started looking at the hemp and then I realized that he actually wrote a book in Canada about flax and the importance of flax for the fiber, for clothing, for so many different things, for food. He had a big part in bringing flax over to North America, but we’re still not using flax even to the point where we could be. Hemp is the same thing.

Matt Baum:
We put it in smoothies, and that’s about it, because it helps in digestion. Right? You can do so much more with it. It’s crazy.

Carolyn Virostek:
With hemp, even making clothing and building materials, if you’ve seen hemp wood, there’s a company, Hemp Wood.

Matt Baum:
I just interviewed them. I just interviewed them on the show. They were fantastic.

Carolyn Virostek:
I love their wood. With Hempcrete, what I think we should be doing is, especially in California, Colorado, Oregon, with all these forest fires, we need to rebuild with hemp, because if you can put a blow torch on hempcrete, why aren’t we building-

Matt Baum:
Same with hemp wood. Hemp wood barely burns, it’s crazy.

Carolyn Virostek:
And they’re antibacterial, antimicrobial. Why aren’t we using this down in South when they’ve got all these floods and hurricanes, because if it gets wet, all you got to do is bring in a dehumidifier and let it dry out.

Matt Baum:
Right. And you are good to go.

Carolyn Virostek:
Whereas now you got to tear down the whole structure because it turns to mold and mildew within three days.

Matt Baum:
Oh, but there’s a whole cottage industry for that too. So they might not be happy about losing their jobs.

Carolyn Virostek:
Exactly. And that’s why the fossil fuel industry pays $125 million a year to lobby, to keep their oils in the plastic industry. It’s just the same thing with everything else. I think we’re going to be moving towards that more and more, building materials, clothing, containers, furniture, I really hope that we can.

Matt Baum:
It’s unavoidable, because oil is going to get more and more expensive and more and more bizarre. And the ways we have to find it, we’re filtering it out of sand and stuff now, it’s going to get more and more expensive, and hemp like you said, they can grow it in a month.

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. And it doesn’t have toxic byproducts. If you fracking all that toxic byproducts that comes from the waters and it contaminates that, where is how it actually can heal the land. And creates more carbon dioxide for us. And it really can help in healing the planet. So yeah. Why aren’t we using more of it? And it’s all political, but we’re getting there.

Matt Baum:
Of course. It’s going to happen. I feel good about it. You feel good about it, we feel good about it. Right?

Carolyn Virostek:
Well, the other thing is that if you look at Europe, they’re way ahead of the game, they’ve been making clothes for decades. Now, they’re even making their cars out of hemp, the internal components, the dashboards and things are made out of hemp because it’s stronger, it’s lighter weight. So it makes the gas mileage even better.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. I interviewed a company that works with Maserati, Mercedes. It’s not like they’re making junk here. They’re making hemp plastic for very expensive high-end cars. And I asked him, “Why don’t we do this in the US?” And he goes, “Well, we don’t really want to mess with all your BS right now, as soon as you guys figure it out, we’ll be there.”

Carolyn Virostek:
Yeah. It’s got to make you question. Why is it that Europe is already making them, but we don’t have the American car manufacturer?

Matt Baum:
It’s shamefully stupid, is what it is.

Carolyn Virostek:
We also know that cars don’t have to rely on fossil fuels. Right? We can be using corn oil, hemp oil to run our cars.

Matt Baum:
Or electricity.

Carolyn Virostek:
Right. They want to tax people if they use solar energy. And it’s government regulations that are backed by these big corporations that are feeling threatened. And that’s why we lost cannabis to begin with in the 1930s, was because of political and corporate concern about getting into their space. And we’re just dealing with that in 2020.

Matt Baum:
That’s why they’re hesitating to bring it back too. I don’t want to take up any more of your time. This has been fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for the straws. They’re great.

Carolyn Virostek:
Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you, Matt. I really appreciate you having me on, and making me feel at ease.

Matt Baum:
Totally. I took a box of the straws up to my local coffee shop and I was like, “Check it out. These are hemp straws.” And they were like, “Oh my God, these are amazing.” It’s like super or liberal, where you go to see dudes having Marxist conversations and stuff in Omaha, in our little blue pocket of Nebraska here in Omaha, but they loved them. So I’ll put them in touch. I’ll definitely put them in touch so they can order some.

Carolyn Virostek:
Great. Thank you, Matt. I appreciate it.

Hemp straws contest winners & Exhemplary Life coupon

Matt Baum:
Carolyn was wonderful to talk to, and she’s the type of person that is very passionate about hemp. And I love speaking to people like that. Funny story, when she initially started and I told her I wasn’t going to mention this on the show, but I thought it was funny enough that you guys should know.

Matt Baum:
When we first started talking, she was really worried that we may not be able to use the interview, because she doesn’t normally talk about this stuff. And she’s not from a science background, but as you can see, she is very well-versed in hemp plastics and bio-plastics, and it was so nice to talk to her. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Carolyn, I will have links to exhemplarylife.com in the show notes. And, like I promised you, if you use the coupon code 25 off that’s 25OFF, you will get 25% off your first purchase at exhemplarylife.com. That’s 25OFF, 25 off use that code.

Matt Baum:
Let them know that you heard about their site here on the Ministry of Hemp podcast and let them know that you appreciate what they are doing on their site. And as always, because we believe that the world is a better place for all when it’s more accessible, we have a full written transcript of this show in the show notes as well.

Matt Baum:
And now it’s contest time as promised. I get to announce the three winners of our exemplary life and Ministry of Hemp, Instagram giveaway, congratulations to @ritualsofthekitchen, @xtra_salt_xtra_lime, and @Kateanne27. You are all big winners of hemp straws and Ministry of Hemp stickers. So go tell every money you win big, when you listen to the Ministry of Hemp podcast. Oh, follow us on Instagram too, more about that in just a moment.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
And that brings us to the end of another exciting episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast. If you dig what we do here on this show, and you think that hemp can change the world, the best way you can support us is to go to Patreon.com/ministryofhemp and become a Ministry of Hemp insider. It is an awesome way to help us spread the word. And you could access to podcast extras, early articles, all kinds of other stuff, not to mention you can feel better knowing you’re helping us spread the good word of hemp education.

Matt Baum:
And if you need more hemp education in your life, get over to ministryofhemp.com. Check out all our awesome articles there. Follow us on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook, we are either at Ministry of Hemp or /Ministry of Hemp, maybe you got hemp questions. Maybe you’ve got some subjects you’d like to hear me talk about on the show.

Matt Baum:
Call me, leave me a message. And tell me about it. 402-819-6417. Leave me a message on our Ministry of Hemp voice line. And I might answer your question on the show with little help and Drew and Kate and maybe even Deseret who you’re going to hear from soon. She’s great. She’s our videographer. We love her. Again, that number is 402-819-6417. Call us, ask your questions and you might hear us answer them right here on the show.

Matt Baum:
Now, I hope you all have a safe and happy Thanksgiving. Remember to wash your hands. I hope you’re not traveling. And if you are out there and be extra careful, please wear a mask the time for me to get out of here. And I like to sign off the same way every time by saying, “Remember to take care of yourself, remember to take care of others and make good decisions, will you?” This is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp.
Signing off.

The post Hemp Straws And The Sustainability Of Hemp With Exhemplary Life appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

Exhemplary Life Hemp Straws are a non-toxic alternative to plastic drinking straws that begin to biodegrade after 120 days. But unlike paper straws and some other natural alternatives, they won’t break down in your cold drinks!

These straws are amazing — they feel and work just like plastic straws but they are plastic free. Exhemplary Life Hemp Straws are even free from PLAs, a common ingredient in most hemp-based plastic products that is very slow to break down. As a result, they biodegrade much faster than hemp plastic.

To enter the Exhemplary Life Hemp Straws giveaway: Follow @Exhemplarylife and @Ministryofhemp on Instagram. In a reply to our contest post on Ministry of Hemp’s Instagram, tag a friend and tell us something you’d like to see made out of hemp. At the end of the giveaway, we’ll pick three winners who will receive a box of hemp straws and a couple of Ministry of Hemp stickers.

Check our podcast and Instagram next week for a list of winners, and a special Exhemplary Life coupon.

Exhemplary Life Hemp Straws Giveaway: Complete contest rules

• This contest runs from November 20, 2020 until November 23, 2020 at 5:00pm Central.
• This contest is sponsored by Ministry of Hemp and Exhemplary Life. It is not sponsored, endorsed, administrated by or associated with Instagram in any way.
• This contest is only open to residents of the United States.
• To enter, like our contest post on Instagram and, in a comment on the post, @tag at least one friend’s Instagram account and tell us something you’d like to see made out of hemp. Be sure to also follow @Exhemplarylife and @Ministryofhemp.
• Contest entries are limited to one entry per person. Additional entries will be ignored.
• After the contest ends, Ministry of Hemp will select 3 winners and contact them via Instagram direct messaging. We reserve the right to pick a new winner if we can’t reach you in a reasonable amount of time.
• Each winner will receive one (1) box of Exhemplary Life Hemp Straws and two (2) Ministry of Hemp stickers. Exhemplary Life and Ministry of Hemp will cover all shipping costs.
• At the end of the contest, we’ll announce the winners on our Instagram and our Podcast. We’ll also publish a special coupon for Exhemplary Life products.

The post Enter Our Exhemplary Life Hemp Straws Giveaway On Instagram appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

Welcome to episode 60 of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. In this episode, Matt has a conversation with Gregory Wilson, founder of Fibonacci LLC which manufactures HempWood. Wilson is creating beautiful wood for flooring, cabinetry, and so much more with compressed hemp fibers. Located in Murray Kentucky, Wilson and his crew of engineers are the only scaled fiber and hemp building manufacturer in the U.S.

They talk about the challenges of creating not only it but inventing the tools needed to manufacture HempWood, its benefits and comparison to other popular woods, and the challenges of launching a hemp start-up during the Covid pandemic. Wilson didn’t just move to Kentucky to be near the hemp his company needs; he’s also hiring agriculture students from nearby Murray State to work in the plant and better understand the hemp itself.

Brought to you by Blue Forest Farms Hemp

We’d like to thank our partners at Blue Forest Farms for making this episode possible.

The folks at BFF pride themselves on a fully seed-to-shelf process that is also fully organic. From selectively breeding their own high-quality varietals of hemp; growing plants locally on their sun-kissed, organic, Colorado farm; monitoring the state-of-the-art extraction process; and even engineering the best tasting formulas, Blue Forest Farms ensures quality at every step in the CBD product creation process.

The Blue Forest Farms What’s Your Number system comes from processing 6 different unique oils. Whether you’re looking for a full spectrum unrefined hemp oil, pure CBD isolate with absolutely no THC, or even an advanced sleep formula that combines CBD with a concentrated amount of CBN, BFF has six oil formulas to fit the unique needs of their customers. We also picked Blue Forest Farms Broad Spectrum Gummies as one of our top brands of CBD gummies.

Use the code “Ministry” at checkout for 20% off your purchase at bffhemp.com and help support a great CBD brand that supports the Ministry of Hemp.

You’ve got hemp questions? We’ve got hemp answers!

Send us your hemp questions and you might hear them answered on one of our Hemp Q&A episodes. Send your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

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Hemp Wood Alternatives: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 60 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, “Hemp Wood Alternatives”:

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum, and this is the Ministry of Hemp podcast brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education.
Welcome back. Recently on the show, we were talking about hemp plastics, and today we’re going to talk about making wood out of hemp. It is stronger than oak, it looks just as nice, it’s not as flammable, and it sure grows faster than trees. But before we get into that, I want to say thanks to our partner, Blue Forest Farms. We are super pumped to be partnering with them again, this week. Blue Forest Farms or BFF, as we call them, has a whole line of amazing CBD products, including a new CBN advanced formula. And I’m going to tell you all about that later on, and how you can get 20% off just for listening to this show. That’s all coming up real soon here. But first, let me introduce you to Gregory Wilson.

Meet Greg Wilson, creator of HempWood

Greg Wilson:
My name is Greg Wilson. I’m the founder of Fibonacci, LLC, which manufactures hemp wood in the United States.

Matt Baum:
Gregory spoke to me from his plant in Murray, Kentucky, he’s out there in the middle of nowhere. You’ll hear him talk about it more later. And he showed me what they’ve got going on. It’s him and team of engineers that are creating machines to create hemp wood. It’s pretty amazing. And my conversation today with Gregory is all about hemp wood, how it works, how it is creating jobs for people right here in America and its future in American carpentry. Here’s my conversation with Gregory Wilson.

Greg Wilson:
We’ve been around for a couple of years now. And we’re the only scaled fiber manufacturer of hemp in the United States, and the only hemp-building materials manufacturer in the United States.

Matt Baum:
So let’s start right there. Why? Why do you think you’re the only one? Is that strange? Is this new? Are you guys diving into a new technology? Or is hemp wood been around for a while?

Greg Wilson:
Well, maybe because we’re the only ones dumb enough to do it. I don’t know.

Matt Baum:
That’s a good answer too. I like that.

Greg Wilson:
So, the journey begins years and years ago. When I was in school, I was studying building materials, studying engineering, and got into vinyl siding, and then Oak flooring. And when I graduated from college, I moved to China because I was studying Chinese as well and figured an engineer who can speak Chinese can write his own ticket.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Greg Wilson:
Got involved in bamboo flooring and helped figure out how to make bamboo flooring acceptable for commercial use, which was a means of making it harder or densified. So you densify woods by either impregnating them with something, some sort of polymers or plastics, or different elements like that, or you compress them. So you can compress woods and then you typically have to glue them together. So we came up with impregnating it, bamboo, and then compressing it, and then baking it in an oven so it stays that same compression ratio or that same density, which gives you hardness and stability in your final product. And then it got into a whole bunch of science and math and stuff like that.

Matt Baum:
Fair enough.

Greg Wilson:
And then we turned it into an algorithm and then PAT and the standard operating procedure and ended up spending 14 years building bamboo factories.

Finding sustainable alternatives to wood and vinyl

Matt Baum:
Wow. So you went from bamboo to hemp? That was the next step.

Greg Wilson:
No, it was not the Chinese government deemed the bamboo patents to be a monopoly in 2009, 2010.

Matt Baum:
Oh my god.

Greg Wilson:
And so my boss then said, “Come up with a new raw material and has to be domestically sourced.” So we came up with fast-growing Eucalyptus grandis, which grows in the south of China. It actually has more Eucalyptus grandis trees in China than people really.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Greg Wilson:
So the raw material was readily available. And it fit into this process. And at that point had set up a nanotech lab in Australia, because we got bought out by an Australian company, so I was working for them. The powers that be just shifted patents. But I set up a nanotech lab there that would take technologies we’ve developed in the laboratory, and then try to commercialize them in China where I was at. So I would go and work with the scientist and then bring it back and find the engineering solution in the plants in China. So then we set up a [inaudible 00:04:48] called strand woven eucalyptus, and it’s still… Every Lowe’s in the United States still buy that stuff.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Greg Wilson:
The bamboo that we set up is… Yeah, the bamboo… We do 40% of the world’s bamboo flooring.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
That company is huge.

Matt Baum:
Jeez.

Greg Wilson:
But I’m involved with it less and less because there has been change of ownership and moving this way and moving that way.

Matt Baum:
Fair enough.

Greg Wilson:
And actually the company does a lot more vinyl flooring now, which doesn’t fit the eco-friendly perspective we’ve been trying to do [crosstalk 00:05:20].

Before hemp, recycled wood

Matt Baum:
That seems like two steps back to me if you’re going for something a little more ecologically friendly, right? So you jumped from bamboo, to Eucalyptus, and then to hemp? Is that where we ended up?

Greg Wilson:
There was another step.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Greg Wilson:
So then after that I started getting pimped out with the algorithm to recycling woods. And so I ended up in Poland and the Ukraine and Tasmania-

Matt Baum:
You’ve been like everywhere.

Greg Wilson:
… figuring out various ways… Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
And figured out various ways to take typically the offcuts from plywood mills and compress it back into wood that can be used as a solid.

Matt Baum:
I would assume it was a nice buck in that too, because you’re basically making money off scrap, stuff that would otherwise just be thrown away.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah, it works. Every place is a little different. And it seems like these days, no matter where you go, some sort of catastrophe or problem or whatever… I own a piece of a company called Smart Oak in Tasmania, where we do just that, and it burned down.

Matt Baum:
Oh.

Greg Wilson:
It was wildfires [crosstalk 00:06:27].

Matt Baum:
That’s awful.

Greg Wilson:
So yeah, it was going [inaudible 00:06:31], and then it caught on fire and I was trying to get back up but [crosstalk 00:06:35]-

Matt Baum:
It literally caught on fire, the bad way, not a good on fire. God, I’m sorry, man.

Greg Wilson:
Hey, I have a house in Annapolis that I actually use to underwrite loans and stuff like that for this place. But I built that place out with smart oak. It’s the only one in the United States.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. My business partner when I got married, my wife and I… In China, if you get married without real estate already own, it’s called a naked wedding. So when we were going to get married and moved to the States, I had to buy a house. I bought an old beater to fix up because that’s what I do.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
And my business partner sent me over a couple of pallets of wood from Tasmania that we had made down there. So it turned from just getting a floor, which he thought it was funny, and instead just send me a couple hundred feet of flooring. He then sent me a couple of pallets of lumber and a couple of different specialty cuts and stuff like that. And so it turned into a hundred thousand dollar remodel with taking down walls and the new kitchen and bathrooms.

Matt Baum:
Jeez. Wow.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. Just in time to move to Kentucky to start HempWood six months later. So my wife-

Creating a hemp-based wood alternative

Matt Baum:
So all of this background prepared you for where you are now, basically?

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. But nothing can prepare you for hemp.

Matt Baum:
No.

Greg Wilson:
But yeah, right place right time. One of my buddies is like, “Man, you’re standing under the basket, and the hemp basketball just got passed to you. All you got to do is let it [crosstalk 00:08:03].”

Matt Baum:
Yeah, literally.

Greg Wilson:
Not that easy.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Okay, you’ve been throwing the word algorithm around a lot. And you named your company Fibonacci, who is a pretty famous mathematician and has his own sequence and everything. I’m guessing that’s on purpose because you guys are math nerds.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
So, how do you apply this algorithm going from things like bamboo, to Eucalyptus, to scrap wood? How do you apply this to hemp which… I mean, bamboo is more of a plant, I guess. It’s a woody plant, but it’s got to be completely different. I mean, how did you even end up in this ballpark? Was it just something that you started talking to people and thought this could be possible, let’s mess around with it, or did you know this will work based on other stuff you’ve done?

Greg Wilson:
Oh yeah. I figured it out in 2010, we used to call it weed wood. I didn’t even really know the difference between any of this stuff. When in China-

Matt Baum:
That’s marketing right there, man; the stoner house buying population.

Greg Wilson:
Here’s the problem, people involved in that don’t usually buy higher end home goods.

Matt Baum:
Go figure.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
They have different priorities.

Greg Wilson:
Now I can say that they are the hipster population-

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
… is a great demographic for us, because I mean, look at me, wearing flannel, I’ve got a beard.

Matt Baum:
You got the look.

Greg Wilson:
I like the environment.

Matt Baum:
There you go.

Greg Wilson:
And then you also have the population that grew up in the ’60s that are on to their forever home, and that are looking for nice things rather than the cheap vinyl or cheap tile that goes into their place. They’re looking for something that’s comfortable and that’s eco-friendly, and that makes them feel good. Because a lot of what it is, you can buy anything for a buck.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
But if you want to get that warm wood feeling in your house, it has to be wood. It can’t be vinyl that looks like wood. If you want to get the eco-friendly element where it doesn’t have VOCs being emitted all through your house, everything, you got to use the eco-friendly [inaudible 00:10:12]. You can’t use formaldehyde. And so all the corners that you can cut, not making it here in the United States, or using dirty glues or chemicals or whatever coatings and stuff on it, make it cheaper, and make it a heck of a lot more commercially viable. But then you’re not telling the truth when you’re saying, “Hey, eco-friendly building material. There’s no added VOCs here. There’s no negative aspects of this. We’re paying all our guys fair.” Where are we live at, it’s inexpensive. Plus Kentucky is not an expensive place to live. And we pay a living wage to everyone here at the factory where you work here full-time you can buy a single family home in town.

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome.

Greg Wilson:
And that gets passed through into the cost of making the product. But that’s the right thing to do.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Greg Wilson:
So there’s where we have a big difference, or a big problem that we have is you can buy cheap flooring for four or five bucks a foot. You can buy American made flooring for six or eight bucks a foot, or you can buy eco-friendly early-adapter, American-made flooring for eight or 10 bucks a foot. And we’ll get better, but it’s all a matter of scaling and how many hours in a day.

Using Kentucky hemp to make hemp wood

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure. So tell me about the process. Before we started recording, you walked me through a little bit and you were like, “This does this and there’s the hemp, and then this comes down here.” And I was just like, “Oh my God, this looks amazing.” How does it work? You’re in Kentucky, so you’re in hemp country right there. Are you using local stuff? Are you using scrap? Where’s it start? What does it start with?

Greg Wilson:
Everything comes from within 100 miles of the plant. And actually, most of it comes from within 60. Because the round bales, you only get about 12 tons on a truck. And so your transportation cost is a large factor. It’s also a big carbon footprint. But the cost, if you go outside of 60 miles, then you’re only able to run two trucks a day. And when you’re running two trucks a day, you take a load in the morning, take a load in the afternoon, then it costs a lot more. It ends up getting close to 20% of your cost of raw material.

Matt Baum:
Jesus.

Greg Wilson:
So the closer you are the better.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, farm to table, almost.

Greg Wilson:
If you go to 100 miles with the square bales, you’re good because it’s still pencils out to the same. You can get 16 to 20 tons per truckload.

Matt Baum:
What’s the difference between a square bale and a round bale? I mean, I literally know nothing about this. So talk to me like I’m a third grader.

Greg Wilson:
Self-Explanatory, square versus round.

Matt Baum:
Really? It’s just more compact or?

Greg Wilson:
Yeah, it’s a circle. Think about stacking a bunch of circles together.

Matt Baum:
Got you.

Greg Wilson:
So you a whole bunch of-

Matt Baum:
Okay. So it’s literally just space?

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. Literally like a bale of hay.

Matt Baum:
Okay, that makes sense.

Greg Wilson:
You’ve seen a picture of a square bale of hay when you stack a bunch of Legos together?

Matt Baum:
Right.

Greg Wilson:
Fit a lot tighter.

Matt Baum:
I was just overthinking it. Okay.

Greg Wilson:
And then a round bale is a round bale around-

Matt Baum:
Literally a round bale.

Greg Wilson:
… like you saw out there, that when you try to stack those on a truck, you get about a quarter, maybe 40% less volume on one trip.

Matt Baum:
Wow. So it really does make sense to do this closer as well, almost farm to table, if you will, because your carbon footprint is lower, you’re spending less on transportation, and you’re getting the stuff right in where you can pull it in the factory and make beautiful wood out of it.

Greg Wilson:
There’s an input table right there.

Matt Baum:
It’s gorgeous. So take me through the process. The hemp comes in, then what happen?

Greg Wilson:
So the hemp comes in here. It is field dried. So it’s less than 15% moisture content. It comes in and it gets stuck on this machine that we had to invent. That guy, Charles, we met earlier, he is the machinist here. He came up with a way of unrolling it like a roll of toilet paper. And actually, the powers behind the scene, kind of the wizard from the Wizard of Oz, is Dario Dumont. And he lives in Tasmania and him and I work on these projects together. So he’s my engineering mentor. And then you have Jimmy Song, who lives in China and he works on the bamboo, and him and I cut our teeth together, working on that. And so, the strand woven Eucalyptus then were me and Jimmy Song, and that’s how we met Dario. And when he got involved with the strand woven Eucalyptus, then he brought the project smarter to us because that was a forestry grant in Tasmania.

Matt Baum:
This is awesome.

Greg Wilson:
So then roped both of them into doing this.

Matt Baum:
You’re like the A-team, you all have specialties. This is great. And it just came together.

Greg Wilson:
Oh yeah, kind of, sort of.

Matt Baum:
And you’re like [inaudible 00:14:55]. This is awesome.

Greg Wilson:
Dario came up with the concept of unrolling a bale of hemp because it has to get picked up. Actually, the format of the raw material coming in is what blindsided me. Because I was just doing lab scale, it looked like a stalk, a piece of bamboo. It was a pole.

Matt Baum:
Right. That’s what I’m thinking in my head, sort of picture it.

Greg Wilson:
But how do you get that out of the field by the thousands of tons? Yeah. Well you have to use existing equipment, which is used for bailing hay, then now use it for bailing hemp and modify it a little bit. And so then these bales come in, we had to come up with a concept of how to take it apart. So if it gets picked up, like a snail shell, like that, then you just reverse that to be able to unroll it. So when it’s getting rolled, it rolls it that way like a fruit roll-up, now it rolls it backwards.

Matt Baum:
And spin it the other way.

Greg Wilson:
Like roll a toilet paper.

Thanks to Blue Forest Farms

Matt Baum:
Let’s take a quick break so we can talk about our partner this week, Blue Forest Farms. Blue Forest Farms prides itself on a full seed to shelf process that is completely organic from selectively breeding their own high quality varietals growing their plants locally in their sun-kissed organic Colorado farms, monitoring the state-of-the-art extraction process and even engineering the best tasting formulas. Blue Forest Farms or BFF, as we call them in-house at Ministry of Hemp, ensures quality at every step in the CBD product creation process. They even have a very cool numbering system that helps you figure out what’s your number based on their six different CBD oils. Maybe you’re looking for a full spectrum, unrefined hemp oil, or you’re looking for pure CBD isolate with absolutely no THC. Or maybe you would be interested in their new sleep formula. It’s a CBN advanced formula, number six, their latest organic CBD oil. They sent me some and I’ve been using it. And I’ve got to say, I’ve been sleeping very well, which is great because I just ran out of my other one.
Blue Forest Farms has a CBD oil that is perfect for any of your needs. And you can find more information about their farm, the genetics, and how their extraction process works over at blueforestfarms.com and then head over to bffhemp.com and check out and buy their products. By the way, if you use the code ‘MINISTRY’ at checkout right now, you’ll get 20% off your first purchase just for listening to the show. Head to bffhemp.com, and of course we’ll have links to that in the show notes for this episode, and use the code MINISTRY to get 20% off your first purchase.
You guys are always contacting me and asking, “Matt, where can I get good CBD? Who is a good CBD company?” Blue Forest Farms is fantastic. We are proud to be partnering with them and I am so excited to recommend them to you guys. Again, head to bffhemp.com, check out their whole line of CBD oils, including their latest number six, which combines the benefit of CBD with a concentrated amount of CBN that’s going to help you get to sleep. And don’t forget to use the code MINISTRY at checkout to get 20% off and let them know you listen to Ministry of Hemp calm to get your information, and you want to support businesses that support us. And now back to my conversation with Gregory.

The process of creating hemp wood

Greg Wilson:
So we came up with this big arm that comes down and you stab a spike through the middle and you hold it up and this arm comes down and pushes it. And then it goes into a crushing machine, which actually we found an old plywood roller and hooked up the plywood roller and married the speed of the roller up to the speed of the bale on roller. So one of them pushes it while the other one pulls it and it breaks open the cell structure of it. And it feeds down a conveyor table and it gets rolled up again into a smaller bundle and chain link fence. And that way it keeps it spaced out, but we can dunk it into the glue. And the glue is actually plywood glue, the pure bond plywood glue, which is the eco-friendly soy-based, but we dilute it down by a significant percentage, so it’s very liquid. And-

Matt Baum:
Is that because you’re using hemp instead of plywood, basically?

Greg Wilson:
No, because plywood, you encapsulate or you roll it on top of the wood veneer.

Matt Baum:
All right.

Greg Wilson:
Well, ours we soak it into, so we dump the hemp for 10 minutes in it, and it’s big rolls. And then these rolls are unrolled on to these racks that go into the dryers that I showed you earlier. We took a bunch of tobacco barns. Actually, the most recent one, we took a rail car, flipped it on its side so we can get the nine foot width, hooked up the guts from five different tobacco barns flowing 75,000 CFM of air through there.

Matt Baum:
Oh my God.

Greg Wilson:
And then we hook all of these different elements that require heat to our bio burner. So we use the same fluid that you use for solar panels called glycol. You burn the ground up waste hemp that we have here, grind it, burn it. And then it transfers that heat to our ovens and dryers. So the same guts, we took the fans out of the tobacco dryers. We got the guts, the radiators, the heat transfers out of there too. So we hook all those up, blow the fans across the hot air, then it dries out the head.

Matt Baum:
So you’re using your own hot air to dry… from a different machine to dry out the hemp as well.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. And we actually circulate it. So it hits the highest temperature requirement first and then drops. So the oven gets hit first, and then it can recirculate that same fluid to go to the drying, which uses a lower temperature. And then it feeds it back into the bio burner, which heats it back up and sends it through the circulation path again.

Matt Baum:
This is amazing nerd engineer magic you’re talking about right now. And I think-

Greg Wilson:
Oh yeah, this is all we do.

Matt Baum:
You’ve kind of just answered my question with like, “Why are you the only one?” Well, because you have to invent this stuff. It’s not out there. Like you guys are building this to do this.

Greg Wilson:
As we go, all the equipment. So and-

Matt Baum:
And you’re copywriting all of this, I assume. So you can be like, “Me, I did.”

Greg Wilson:
Oh yeah, there’s patents and trademarks and mayhem all over it.

Matt Baum:
Nice.

Greg Wilson:
Trademark the word HempWood, trademark the logo. So if you see hemp wood being manufactured anywhere in the world, it’s us.

Matt Baum:
It’s you.

Greg Wilson:
Then it goes to our next station. We’ve taken a whole bunch of agricultural equipment from the cotton industry, the tobacco industry, the bamboo industry, you name it. And actually our best employees are guys that we got from the ag school here. So the reason we’re based in Murray is because the first people to plant hemp since World War II was Murray State University.

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure.

Greg Wilson:
And so everybody that’s working on the farms, the school has five farms, they somehow, some way know something about hemp, because that’s one of their prime things here.

Matt Baum:
That’s so cool.

Greg Wilson:
This area doesn’t get huge yields for crops. We only get like 200 bushels an acre of corn, whereas if you go to Iowa, you get 250. So here does a lot more of the specialty crops. That’s why Kentucky is known for tobacco, and Kentucky is known for sorghum, and Kentucky is known for hemp.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
Kentucky is known for horses, because if you get a little bit farther west and a little bit farther north, then you’re in better soil and better climate for growing your row crops. So here’s the edge of row crops. But that’s why the school here gets into all these different specialty crops. And that’s why they’ve been researching hemp. And they set up the agricultural hemp innovation center, and they actually created an incubator for me to land here over top of some of the bigger universities-

Matt Baum:
Not only-

Greg Wilson:
… [crosstalk 00:22:41] out west with one of the Oregon schools.

Matt Baum:
Not only your raw materials, but you’re drawing from a pool of education as well that’s right there.

Greg Wilson:
Shoot, half of the employees here come from there-

Matt Baum:
That is awesome.

Greg Wilson:
… whether interns or whatever. Buy yeah.

Matt Baum:
That is awesome.

Greg Wilson:
Oh, yeah. And people that worked on a farm factory works easy for them. As farm workers, you got a roof over your head, right?

Matt Baum:
Yeah, man. It’s a huge plus.

The science behind HempWood

Greg Wilson:
Absolutely. But yeah. So getting back into the process, once it comes out of the dryer, we batch it again. And we’ve got a catalyst scale. Charles welded up these enormous racks for us so we can take it and batch for each block. So we have a uniform amount, which is the algorithm to… You’ve got 14 steps. So it’s algorithm that has to hit these numbers in order to make a uniform piece of material at the end that outperforms our target being Brazilian cherry, which is the high end benchmark of global wood. So-

Matt Baum:
Okay. When it’s done, is it the same? Is it stronger? Is it as strong as Brazilian cherry or?

Greg Wilson:
It is harder than hickory, has the same density of Brazilian cherry, and it is made in the USA in four months.

Matt Baum:
That is amazing.

Greg Wilson:
So it performs like a tropical hardwood, it has… stability is greater than Oak, harder than hickory, density of Brazilian cherry. So you can tick all the boxes of… There’s your mainstream American white Oak. That’s our price point that we’re trying to get to. That’s what everybody talks about. Red Oak. If you’re really into wood, you know that red Oak is not the Oak that you want to use, white Oak is. So red Oak costs half the price, it’s not as great for furniture. When you go to a box shop and you get your flooring at Lowe’s or Home Depot, and they’re like, “Oh, hey, solid Oak flooring,” is typically red Oak.

Matt Baum:
It’s red Oak.

Greg Wilson:
Red Oak doesn’t work as well. Well, it’s more susceptible to moisture than white Oak, so that’s why furniture is made out of it. White Oak actually works a lot better. It doesn’t chip and fracture and crack. So we’re trying to target white Oak as the mainstream, but we’re trying to outperform it by getting the density of Brazilian cherry, so if the density is higher, then so is your hardness, and so is your stability, because the density-

Matt Baum:
It lasts longer, better when it gets wet, I assume.

Greg Wilson:
Yep, absolutely.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
Anyway, so getting back into it, again, we weigh it out, we batch it. We stick it into the press, we spray some more organic acid on it, which is the activator, which causes that cross-linking to happen, that we stole those proteins from the soy flour and impregnate it into-

Matt Baum:
Okay. [inaudible 00:25:23] all together, literally.

Greg Wilson:
3000 tons of pressure.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. Okay. I mean, the press is 24 feet tall, so 1200 gallons of hydraulic fluid [crosstalk 00:25:37].

Matt Baum:
Wow. What? Okay.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah. [inaudible 00:25:40] two flatbeds and three containers, and then we had to assemble it for 45 days.

Matt Baum:
Oh my god.

Greg Wilson:
We had to design that whole thing too.

Matt Baum:
It sounds like you built this around this monolithic monster machine basically.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you have to crane this thing in through the ceiling.

Matt Baum:
Right. I picture you guys worshiping it like a god before you go to work daily.

Greg Wilson:
And we painted it hemp green.

Matt Baum:
Oh, nice. Very nice. So after it comes out of there it’s-

Greg Wilson: (crosstalk 00:26:11)

Matt Baum:
Oh, that’s him? Oh, wow. That is a monstrosity. Oh my god. So after it comes out of there it’s hemp wood, it’s done.

Greg Wilson:
Oh, no, it’s still got a week’s worth.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Creating hemp products sustainably

Greg Wilson:
So that process I just explained is a two-day process. You’re talking 36 to 48 hours from hemp stock to pressed into a mold. But then it has to go into an oven for 10 hours. And that oven we took… Actually, the first one we bought off the Facebook marketplace, there was an old motorcycle powder coating oven, and we were making our four foot blocks in it. And then we just recently got our new oven, which is a 20 foot container that we ripped apart, and we hooked up a 10,000 CFM blower on it and then hooked it into our bio burner. And so the bio burner then transfers the heat first, because that requires a higher temperature-

Matt Baum:
Which is the oven?

Greg Wilson:
Right, blows the hot air across the molds and bakes them and then recirculates it back to our dryers, which then throws the secondary heat. And because it’s too hot, then it actually has to throw it through a pipe that’s surrounded by another pipe full of water. And so it can actually heat the water to the temperature that we need because it only needs to be 100 degrees instead of 250. And so then it heats the water, which then recirculates through the dryer. And then the glycol goes back to the bio burner to get reheated and sent back out.

Matt Baum:
And this keeps you from having to have some stupid machine that just makes heat for this or just heats up this element. You have one machine that’s already making the heat and you’re taking that heat and pulling it everywhere you need it to go along the steps of the process.

Greg Wilson:
I replaces like four and a half million BTUs per hour of natural gas.

Matt Baum:
Jeez! Okay. That’s impressive.

Greg Wilson:
It creates a couple of thousand dollars a month worth of energy.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
From a couple of thousand dollars worth of dumping fees we would had… In reality, we were just throwing it out in the field. I mean, we’re all farmers.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
You’re not allowed to burn it in the open. And so you it’s what we call ditch filler.

Matt Baum:
Fair enough.

Greg Wilson:
But there’s only so many ditches [crosstalk 00:28:19].

Matt Baum:
[crosstalk 00:28:20] mountain maker at some point, otherwise.

Greg Wilson:
Well, the first year we got mount hemp more, then ended up having like 150 tons of hemp that we couldn’t use because it got moldy or it got left out, or [inaudible 00:28:34] species. We had to try all the different cuttings as [inaudible 00:28:37] didn’t work, and all these different ways of trying to harvest it, ended up with like 150 tons of hemp. And it’s still sitting at the university farm.

Matt Baum:
Oh, wow.

Greg Wilson:
And so, yeah, we’re trying to get the ag fraternity to burn it at homecoming to try to get rid of it. They’re not going to let that happen.

Matt Baum:
Can you feed it to the race horses or something or? I don’t know.

Greg Wilson:
We do feed it to pigs.

Matt Baum:
Okay. So let’s get back to the wood though.

Greg Wilson:
Okay.

Matt Baum:
So now you’ve baked it. Is it done?

Making hemp wood, the final stages

Greg Wilson:
Nope. Then we have to take it and demold it. So it’s in these huge metal molds, it weighs 330 pounds inside of the mold and six foot long, six inches by six inches wide. A [crosstalk 00:29:19] weighs-

Matt Baum:
One six foot piece weighs 300 pounds?

Greg Wilson:
Including the metal mold around it.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Greg Wilson:
The actual wood inside, it’s 90 pounds, for a six footer or 60 pounds for a four footer. So then you have to open this out. So we have a jackhammer and an air gun. We’re opening these molds and you’ve got to take it with a crane, lift it upside down and pry it open. But then we had to come up with a machine to be able to automate that. So that’s just arrived from the fabricator, but we haven’t got to put it into play yet. We got hit with a $51,000 tariff on that, as well as the automation equipment to go into our press because the government, I guess, wasn’t real favorable towards making American manufacturing jobs, or maybe they just had their heads in the sand.

Matt Baum:
It’s funny because they keep saying that they are, so hmm. I wonder who’s lying. Ah, it drives me insane.

Greg Wilson:
It’s an election year, so.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Greg Wilson:
I can say that our local Congressman, Congressman Comer, is doing everything he can for us.

Matt Baum:
That’s great.

Greg Wilson:
But on a federal level, crickets. So these blocks come out, and then we open the mold, we’ve got an automation machine for that. And then they have to rest for a couple of weeks to stabilize.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Greg Wilson:
And then we have a saw, we just got our new saw in. We have to come up with a means of cutting it properly because our regular wood saws weren’t strong enough. And so our old baker resaw, now we’ve turned it into a fully automated, like 50 foot long saw, where it cuts the edge-

Matt Baum:
So this is so dense that you can’t just use a wood saw on it? A normal wood saw won’t cut it?

Greg Wilson:
No, it’s too strong.

Matt Baum:
Wow. That’s incredible.

Greg Wilson:
I had a hell of a wrench into our business plan.

Matt Baum:
I’ll bet.

Greg Wilson:
Because we were going to sell the wood, now we have to cut the wood because everybody initially said, “Oh, yeah, I’m a big wood guy. I got a big saw, send it my way.” And then they said, “Yeah, it’s a losing money operation [crosstalk 00:31:18] that stuff.”

Matt Baum:
“You broke my saw.”

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. And burns up your blades and breaks and everything. And so now, it came back to us, we got to cut the wood into the usable sizes for the manufacturers. So then we had to go and get a frickin hundred thousand dollars saw.

Matt Baum:
Good Lord.

Greg Wilson:
So then the wood is cut, and then we put into our balancing rooms, which once again, draw the heat from our bio burner to keep them at a certain temperature, and a dehumidifier in there. So you circulate dehumidified warm air, and then it causes it to dry out in about two weeks. And then we can turn it into flooring, and furniture, and picture frames, and cutting boards, and what we call home goods and [crosstalk 00:32:01] woods, there’s cabinetry and stuff like that.

Growing hemp for hemp wood

Matt Baum:
So what’s the color like? Because I mean, hemp is green and wood is not. At what point in the process are you like… Is the abuse on the cellular structure? I mean, that looks like wood, what you’re showing me. Is it just what you do to it you end up like that or are you adding something to it or taking something out of it to get it to look like wood? Or does it just end up looking like wood?

Greg Wilson:
We’ve had to do a whole lot to do that. But have you ever seen how wheat sun-dries? Wheat grows in a field and it’s green, right?

Matt Baum:
Sure. But it drys brown.

Greg Wilson:
And it sun dries and it turns a woody color, right?

Matt Baum:
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess, yeah. I mean, same with your grass clippings even, you know?

Greg Wilson:
Yep. So the key is to get it at a golden brown point before it molds, because if it molds, it turns black. If it’s too early, it’s green. So you got to, once you cut it, let it set for two or three days on one side, turn it over, let it set for one or two days in the sun, and then bale it up and get it out.

Matt Baum:
And then you go, “That’s the color we want, that looks like the cherry wood or the Oak or whatever we’re going for, get it in here and let’s turn it into wood.”

Greg Wilson:
Yep. Now, there is no cherry wood about it or anything like that. It is more of a Oak color. And then actually, there’s something called the maillard effect that happens in the glue, which I didn’t even know about until this happened. But the maillard effect is like the browning of gravy.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, I was going to say [inaudible 00:33:31]. And the maillard effect is like one thing we talked about when you’re searing proteins, the same thing.

Greg Wilson:
Protein to carbohydrates .So we’re stealing the proteins from the soy, baking it in an oven, and then it turns brown. So you’ve got the hemp stocks with the brown from the soy, which gives it the look it has.

Matt Baum:
That’s amazing. That is amazing. Instead of cutting down a tree that you said… It takes how long to grow before you can cut it down for wood?

Greg Wilson:
For Oak, usually 60 to 80 years is standard for Oak. And then a lot of times when you’re getting into your tropical hardwoods or old growth forest, you’re talking 100 or 200 year old stuff. Or even, I mean, as long as it’s been growing, if it’s old growth, they haven’t cut that forest before.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
That’s why the big deal about plantation forest versus old growth. Plantation, when someone was responsible enough, first time they cut it down, they planted something else there, and then you can get it in the cycle. Whereas if it’s old growth, then it becomes a mature forest and it’s got a whole different ecosystem that’s going on underneath of it, because you get that huge canopy that goes up. And once that canopy goes up, then you typically have your more traditional trees, at least in our area that are able to support more life. Maybe not from where they hide in it, but your nut trees and your… Like your walnuts and your acorns and different things like that, that take a lot longer to grow than your traditional trees that come up first or your poplars and your pines.
And your poplars and pines, 20 years, that’s a mature tree, maybe 40 years. Whereas your slower growing hardwoods are your Oaks and your hickories and your black walnuts and your ash and things like that. And so usually you have that cycle where the fast-growing ones get up first, and then your slower growing ones come up, but they eventually overtake your poplars and your pines. And that’s how you see an old growth forest come about.

Matt Baum:
So hemp-

Greg Wilson:
So we’re trying to replace those.

Matt Baum:
You’re replacing it with hemp and the hemp that you’re growing, that you guys are bringing in, how long is that growing?

Greg Wilson:
Four months-ish, three to four.

Matt Baum:
So four months versus 60 years, more or less?

Greg Wilson:
Yeah.

HempWood vs. traditional wood

Matt Baum:
Good Lord. Okay. And so when it comes to making wood-

Greg Wilson:
Numbers don’t lie.

Matt Baum:
When it comes to making wood, how many acres of forest are we cutting down to… I don’t even know the terms to use here, to make X amount of wood versus acres of hemp to make X amount of wood?

Greg Wilson:
So what we produce per acre of hemp that we get can replace about 30 Oak trees that are 60 years old-ish. It’s debatable how many trees grow on an acre.

Matt Baum:
Of course.

Greg Wilson:
Once it gets up there, then the canopy goes out. And so you actually have spacing in between the trees and everything. So is it a direct one for one replacement on a yearly basis? Probably not, but if you’ve got 60 years to have a crack at it, I guess it would be… It’s probably more like 40 to 50 of those years, you’d have a direct replacement. Or even if it’s half, if it replaces every two years what you can grow on an acre but you can do it 30 times-

Matt Baum:
That math catches up great.

Greg Wilson:
… in the same 60-year. [crosstalk 00:36:49] And it’s pulling all the carbon out. I mean, I’m not a carbon nerd or anything. I’m a bow hunter. My whole thing is, I need an Oak tree to hang my tree stand on, when a deer comes [crosstalk 00:37:02].

Matt Baum:
Sure. Yeah, so you can shoot a deer or a turkey while it walks by or whatever.

Greg Wilson:
Absolutely. So if somebody comes and cuts down all my Oak trees, then all of a sudden, I’m going to be hunting from the ground, you don’t get nearly as much.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Is this the future of wood? Is this where we’re going?

Greg Wilson:
No.

Matt Baum:
No. Why is that?

Greg Wilson:
This will be a single digit percentage replacement for wood.

Matt Baum:
Why?

Greg Wilson:
You’re never going to replace because Oak, because Oak is a good thing. And if it’s done properly, having a wood floor or wood furniture that’s sustainably harvested, or is made here in the United States is always going to be the dominant player. And that’s not a bad thing. But if it can take care of some of those ones that are just clear-cut, or if it can take out some of those ones that are cutting areas that shouldn’t be cut, or if it can reduce some of that pressure by being, say, 3% or 4% of the hardwood industry, that’s where it’ll go.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, fair enough.

Greg Wilson:
Because there’s nothing wrong with Oak. There’s something wrong with us that take advantage of it in the wrong way.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, doing it irresponsibly.

Greg Wilson:
Correct. I mean, I work with wood. I love wood. There’s nothing wrong with wood. When people say, “Oh man, you’re trying to take out wood jobs.” No, we’re not.

Matt Baum:
See, now I-

Greg Wilson:
(crosstalk 00:38:31) another type of sawmill.

Matt Baum:
That’s where I was, like, “Oh, man, he’s trying to take our wood job.” I’m like, “Take out the wood jobs. The wood jobs are bad.” So I was really surprised to hear you say, no, it’s not bad. It’s just, it needs to be done responsibly. And right now it’s not being done responsibly everywhere.

Greg Wilson:
A lot of it is. The majority of your people are doing it the right way. But it’s a lot more profitable to do it the wrong way.

Matt Baum:
Of course.

Greg Wilson:
I mean, that’s what it all comes down to.

Matt Baum:
That’s pretty much every industry, unfortunately.

Greg Wilson:
And most things in life are.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Greg Wilson:
If you want to buy something made in America, expect a 20% premium. That’s just the way it is.

Building with HempWood

Matt Baum:
So what do these guys think about you? What do they think about a guy like you, who loves wood within the wood world and now you’re doing hemp wood? Are they making it funnier? Do they think you’re some kind of crazy hippie? Are they into this?

Greg Wilson:
It’s a mix. At the end of the day, people are genuinely good. And at the end of the day, people are trying to provide for theirs, whatever that is. And so if someone’s doing hardwood trade out of Africa, they’re probably not going into it saying, “Hey, I want to do this the wrong way to become overly wealthy.” They’re probably saying, “My customer gave me this order and it has to fit their budget. And that’s fine.” And the people that are doing those same types of things, more often than not, look at us, not as a disrupter that’s going to put them out of business, as, “Hey, maybe I can sell your wood too.” And so, I don’t know, instead of being a dick, it’s oftentimes better to just kind of be nice and work with people.

Matt Baum:
Right on. I love that answer. That’s great. I know, coming from our show where we do hemp education, we can get lost in the cheerleader aspect so much so that it’s easy to be like, “No, those guys are wrong. They’re doing it wrong. These guys are doing it right. We’ve got to stick with these guys.” And the answer is probably working together. The answer is saying like-

Greg Wilson:
Oh, absolutely.

Matt Baum:
… combining hemp wood with Oak, and showing like, “Look, they can both work together really well.”

Greg Wilson:
Why would you want to skirt 90% of the industry expertise? Why would you want to try to get around people who know how to work with wood? Why not just say, “Here’s a new product, play around with it? Tell me how it seals. Tell me how it sands. Tell me how it does this.” And share it on our platform. Because our big thing is, if somebody buys hemp wood from us and make something out of it, the trademark of, “Hey, this is a HempWood product,” goes right along with it. So they can say, “Hey, I’m making hemp wood tables, stack our logo on it.” And then actually, they can share it on our different platforms, whether it’s sending it to us, and we’ll put it on our social media, or putting it up on our website. And we send customers their way, and we allow all the different people working on it to tell each other how it works, and to avoid a bunch of those costly mistakes that end up getting people frustrated. Because it’s not the same as your traditional woods. And so very often, if you tell somebody how to do something, give them a 10-minute tutorial, they can avoid half of the mistakes that would cause them to reject a new material.
We’re still in that infancy stage of what we’re doing. And so our flooring right here, in order for people to be able to use it easily, and for us to be able to make enough of it, we lay it up on plywood, but we find eco-friendly plywood that uses the same glues that we use. And then when someone’s laying this piece of floor, it performs the same as a engineered Oak, which is the majority of your Oak flooring industry.

Matt Baum:
So the guys that work with it know what they’re getting and know how to use it, because it’s going to perform same way.

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. It’s a choice you have to make. And it’s not an easy choice, because making a buck ain’t easy. And you got what, 20% of the population that’s unemployed because of COVID? I mean, you got all types of situations and scenarios that are almost impossible to comprehend all of them.

The impact of COVID-19

Matt Baum:
Right. How hard did COVID hit you guys?

Greg Wilson:
COVID (censored by Matt) everything. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that on air.

Matt Baum:
You can say. No, it’s an adult show, don’t worry.

Greg Wilson:
So when COVID first came, luckily, we had raised some money before that to build out the plant. And so our sales turned off, our factory was shut down for six weeks. We weren’t allowed to manufacture.

Matt Baum:
Wow.

Greg Wilson:
And so we had almost no sales except for the stuff that was happening online. And John stuck with it and he went home for like a week and then said he couldn’t deal with that anymore. And just kept coming back into the office. He was like, “I’d rather be here.”

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Greg Wilson:
We weren’t allowed to have production because we have more than 10 people in a space. And so we shut for six weeks and then we had to open up with all these stupid rules that I understand, but it also kind of counteracts the other ones because we have to have like hand washing stations. But we don’t have a septic in order to capture all greywater that comes out. And so you’ve got to have… But you’re allowed to have a soap dish and a hose bib as long as it doesn’t have a base in underneath of it. And so we put these up with hand sanitizers everywhere and getting employees at the time is hard. And we still have double the absentee rate that we normally have.
Our customer base turned off, significantly, turned back on, now has turned back off. Our prime customer, people who like what we do are typically in your 20s, 30s, 40s; they typically are a homeowner, very often they’re associated with urban area. Maybe they’re not living in the urban area or maybe they work into it, and so they’re around… What I say is, someone who walks to work choking on tailpipe fumes usually cares a little bit more about the environment than somebody like myself. I live on a farm. It’s actually an organic farm, but I don’t do the paperwork for that. That’s the guys that actually take care of it. I just have the 30-some acres right around the house as like trees, and I got some cows, and I got some chickens and stuff like that. But for me, pollution isn’t a thing, I can pee outside, it doesn’t matter.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
But when you’re in a city with that many vehicles and that many people and all that stuff, thinking about the environment is a much bigger thing because you see what that many humans can change.

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Greg Wilson:
And so most of our sales go to urban areas, or people that are in urban areas that don’t have a second home that’s in the mountains or on the beach. A lot of times it’s going into… It was hospitality, so ecotourism hotels and restaurants, sushi restaurants, and yoga studios, and stuff like that. COVID turned all that upside down. And so cannabis companies started buying hemp to build up their shops.

Matt Baum:
That’s cool.

Greg Wilson:
Because they were deemed to be essential everywhere, where hotels and restaurants all shut down.

Matt Baum:
That’s cool.

Greg Wilson:
And so, yeah, our industry friends kind of picked it up and said, “The election is coming, we’re going to still be building this stuff out.”

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome.

Greg Wilson:
It’s on the ballot in all types of states. And so we haven’t quite mastered how to talk to, or work with cannabis companies because it seems like a significant portion of that market segment are consultants and resellers that don’t actually have skin in the game or break and motor.

Matt Baum:
I’ve talked to a lot of them. So yeah, I know what you mean.

Greg Wilson:
A lot of my news feed turned into mask salesmen and gloves salesmen during COVID. But I can say that that’s where people are already accepting. So you don’t have to explain hemp to those people-

Matt Baum:
Right, they’re in.

Greg Wilson:
They already get it.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, you’re preaching to the choir.

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. So yeah, COVID threw everything [inaudible 00:46:57], and we’re still turned upside down. We’re stuck with the plan of continuing to build out and automate the facility while we let the whole market… What we can’t control will work its way out. And so we have to just keep building, keep moving forward. And what we do need to do is we need to get everyone per stakeholders to support the product by buying some hemp wood. Go to hempwood.com and, well, you can see all the stuff that’s on there. We’ve got our office number on there. Yep, sales@hempwood.com. You can contact us and just kind of be part of the solution, because it takes a village to get this thing off the ground.

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Greg Wilson:
And man, is it wearing hard on… Well, we started in 2018. We got our factory operational in ’19, and we actually had our finished goods ready to launch at NoCo the end of March, and then at the North American Wood Flooring Association at the end of April.

Matt Baum:
Just in time that you shut down.

Greg Wilson:
And so we’ve had all four of our trade shows canceled. And it’s been a dog’s breakfast with trying to scrape that back.

Matt Baum:
But even in a perfect year, it would still be difficult, but with this garbage, oh, my God. I mean, it’s got to be a nightmare.

The future of HempWood

Greg Wilson:
Oh, yeah. It’s insane. The only thing I know to do is just trust our team to keep working.

Matt Baum:
Right, and just keep going.

Greg Wilson:
Yeah, keep the publicity going, because we’re literally in the middle of a field. It was corn this year, it was hemp last year. We’re in the middle of the field. The closest town to us is five miles. And so there’s not a whole lot of foot traffic that happens due to COVID.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Greg Wilson:
The only way that we can get it out there and let people know is through stuff like this.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, and talk about it.

Greg Wilson:
And we just started traveling again. And so we’re literally driving around every week. We go to a new city with a trailer full of hemp wood try to figure it out. I can say that builders, for the most part, the younger generation say, “Well, that’s cool.” We get over a 90%, “Tell me more” rate. But then converting to actual sales on large scale build out, everyone wants to kind of see how it works and what it does and what’s happening. It started with friends and family and members of the company.
I actually build something new every Sunday out of it. Sunday afternoons are for making something out of hemp wood. And so I can speak intelligently about how to make it. So this past Sunday, I made a chicken coop. That doesn’t count, that was out of pine. Sunday before I made a cabinet for my wife, and we put it up in the bathroom. And so I had to figure out how to laminate lamellas onto plywood to be able to build a cabinet out of it. The doors are solid on the front, the face is solid, but then I had to get skins on the side. And so the number one reason that cabinetry makers, which are typically still made in the US, were not accepting of the product is because we didn’t offer plywood that had the face on it to do the skins on the side so it looks like it’s all hemp wood.

Matt Baum:
Right. And so they couldn’t get it to match or sync up.

Greg Wilson:
Yup. And so I do go and start working with that and say, “Hey, it is possible, look this way.”

Matt Baum:
That’s R&D, though. It’s just R&D, is what you’re doing.

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. Before that was building coffee tables. So I actually made the table during COVID… Our first table was made, and we made it out of a solid and it was way too heavy. And so we chopped that into three… Actually fell under the knife, maybe a month ago, and chopped it into three coffee tables because the table weighed over 200 pounds. So you couldn’t move it around. So that was three coffee tables that are like 70 pounds.

Matt Baum:
But if a tornado hits and you climb under that thing, you’re fine. Like it’s not blown away.

Greg Wilson:
In case somebody comes to shoot up the office just-

Matt Baum:
Yeah, just turn the 200-pound table over and you’re fine.

Greg Wilson:
So just working through all that stuff. The picture frames came about because we took it to our cabinet door manufacturer, and said, “Hey, what can you do here?” We need something that we can sell direct to people were showing up last year like crazy at our factory, just wanting to do tours. But people don’t buy wood. Nobody has tools to just buy [crosstalk 00:51:31].

Matt Baum:
Yeah. You don’t just walk in and, “I’m going to buy some wood, please.” “How much wood can I buy for $15?” Or whatever.

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. But everybody that tours the factory, we now figured out where you end the tour in the wood shop and we say, “And here’s picture frames for sale.”

Matt Baum:
You always end in the gift shop. That’s the rule, you always end in the gift shop.

Greg Wilson:
Exactly. Now here’s the next one. The number one question that we get about hemp wood; the number one thing people do when they get a piece in their hand is smell it. The number two thing or the number one thing that they say to us is, “What happens when it catches on fire, you’re going to get high and the firefighters? This and that.”

Matt Baum:
Give me a break.

Greg Wilson:
So now we’re making firestarter logs, so I can say, “Why don’t you buy some firestarters and then tell me?” So when people come up with a smart ass comment about, “Well, are you going to get high in case it’s on fire?” I say, “Buy some logs and you-“

Matt Baum:
Yes, one way to find out, huh?

Greg Wilson:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
So let me ask you, on the subject of burning… And I’m not going to ask you that stupid question. Does it burn like normal wood? I mean, or it doesn’t? I wouldn’t assume so because it’s so dense.

Greg Wilson:
Correct. So higher density causes lower flammability, as well as being a composite because it has a glue based out of that soy. It actually burns much slower and it smokes much less.

Matt Baum:
So it’s safer, too.

Greg Wilson:
And the smoke is actually… It’s cleaner smoke. It’s white smoke rather than black smoke. And that actually comes from the soy burning. Go figure. When we built that bio burner and we had to burn the residuals in there, when we grind it up, it came out white. I was like, “What the hell is that?” And then all of a sudden we found out that was from the soy.

Matt Baum:
That’s the soy. So it’s even safer from like a flammability perspective too.

Greg Wilson:
Yes, it is less flammable than your traditional woods, especially your softwoods. It is less flammable than your traditional hardwoods like your Oaks and your hickories because the density is higher. So it doesn’t catch on fire as easy.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
I want to thank Gregory again for coming on the show. We had an amazing talk and it went on for much longer than this. And there’s actually a podcast extra you’ll be able to check out with me and Greg talking about his farm and some other things he’s involved in. That’ll be up for our Patreon Ministry of Hemp Insiders. And I’ll tell you how to become one of those shortly here.

Of course, you can find all the links to HempWood and HempWood’s Instagram and their Twitter feed and everything they’re up to in the show notes for this episode.

That’s about it for this episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast. And I know I promised you that there was a show about Delta-8-THC coming, and it is coming. I’m just trying to put it together and get the right people to talk about it. So in the meantime, check out our Delta-8-THC FAQ. What is Delta-8-THC? It’s all about this new cannabinoid. And you can find that article on ministryofhemp.com, along with a new review of Healist Naturals body relief lotions, really nice for everyday aches and pains. Check out that review as well.
Again, huge, thanks to BFF for partnering with us. And you can find links to their site and information on how to get 20% off your first order in the show notes. And speaking of shownotes, here at Ministry of Hemp, we believe that a more accessible world is better for everybody. So we have a complete written transcript for this episode in the notes too.

If you dig this show and you like what we do on the site, then do us a favor and become a Ministry of Hemp Patreon Insider. Go to patreon\ministryofhemp, and any amount of money you give, makes you an Insider and get you all kinds of cool stuff like early access to articles, podcast extras, like the one I mentioned with Gregory, and all kinds of other cool things that we’re doing. It is the best way to support Ministry of Hemp.

And if you want to help support this podcast, drop us a review, a little star, or a quick written review, wherever you are downloading or listening to podcasts. It really helps us to get this information in front of people that are looking for it. And that brings us to the end of the show where I like to end the same way every time by saying, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others, and vote next week if you haven’t already. Oh, and make good decisions to, will you? This is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp, signing off.

The post Hemp Wood Alternatives: Sustainable Building Materials With HempWood appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

Although we’ve discussed hemp plastic before, today on our podcast we’re looking at a new form: 3D printing with hemp.

On the Ministry of Hemp podcast, our host Matt talks with Andrew Bader, founder of Corfiber and HempVision. Matt first met Andrew at a local Farmer’s Market in Omaha, Nebraska where he was 3d printing chess pieces for a chess set made of hemp plastic.

Matt spoke to Andrew from his basement where he started his company and 3d prints sunglasses, jewelry, and several other hemp plastic items. They discuss the difficulties of starting a hemp plastic business in a market with no shortage of product but a serious lack of hemp plastic processing. Andrew comes from a corn and soybean farming family and also has some unique insight into why more farmers aren’t switching to hemp crops yet.

In the closing moments, Matt teases his upcoming episode about the cannabinoid Delta 8, which we’ve just created an FAQ about. Matt also mentions his previous interview with Kelly Rippel about Kansas hemp.

Brought to you by Blue Forest Farms Hemp

We’d like to thank our partners at Blue Forest Farms for making this episode possible.

The folks at BFF pride themselves on a fully seed-to-shelf process that is also fully organic. From selectively breeding their own high-quality varietals of hemp; growing plants locally on their sun-kissed, organic, Colorado farm; monitoring the state-of-the-art extraction process; and even engineering the best tasting formulas, Blue Forest Farms ensures quality at every step in the CBD product creation process.

The Blue Forest Farms What’s Your Number system comes from processing 6 different unique oils. Whether you’re looking for a full spectrum unrefined hemp oil, pure CBD isolate with absolutely no THC, or even an advanced sleep formula that combines CBD with a concentrated amount of CBN, BFF has six oil formulas to fit the unique needs of their customers. We also picked Blue Forest Farms Broad Spectrum Gummies as one of our top brands of CBD gummies.

Use the code “Ministry” at checkout for 20% off your purchase at bffhemp.com and help support a great CBD brand that supports the Ministry of Hemp.

You’ve got hemp questions? We’ve got hemp answers!

Send us your hemp questions and you might hear them answered on one of our Hemp Q&A episodes. Send your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

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3D Printing Hemp Plastic: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 59 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, “3D Printing with Hemp Plastic”:

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum, and this is the Ministry of Hemp Podcast brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education. You may have noticed I’ve been trying to talk about hemp plastic more on the show lately because it’s important. Hemp plastics are a renewable and responsible way to replace oil-based plastics. We’re going to talk about it again on the show today. But before that, I want to say thanks to our partner for this episode. Blue Forest Farms is partnering with us to bring you this episode and this information, and they are a fantastic company.

Matt Baum:
We’re super excited to partner with them. And later on in the show, I’m going to tell you more about them, their line of high quality CBD products and give you a discount code you can use at bffhemp.com. So listen for that, and huge thanks to Blue Forest Farms for partnering with us. Today on the show, I’m talking to Andrew Bader. Andrew is actually a local Omaha guy like me. I bumped into him at a farmer’s market where he had a tent set up and they were 3D printing hemp gifts using hemp plastic. I was blown away. I didn’t even know anybody in town was doing this, and I told him he has to come on my show and talk to me. Andrew is very much in the startup phase with his company, Corfiber. He’s currently operating out of his basement and that’s where our conversation starts.

Meet Andrew Bader

Andrew Bader:
I currently work in my basement. My operation is out of the basement. I look forward to expanding someday.

Matt Baum:
And so, this is truly a basement operation, when you’re just getting off the ground?

Andrew Bader:
All the great companies start out of the basement.

Matt Baum:
It’s true, man. It’s absolutely true. I got to say, I was a little shocked. I was walking through my local farmer’s market a couple of weeks ago, and there were some guys there making sunglasses right in front of us on a 3D printer right here in Omaha, Nebraska. Everybody I’ve talked to has been… All over the world all over the coast, in Europe, I’ve talked to a couple of people in India actually, you’re the first person that I’ve talked to in Omaha, Nebraska, where I live by the way that’s actually doing stuff with hemp. How did you get started on this?

Andrew Bader:
Well, I wanted to work with hemp plastics since I graduated high school. I figured the amount of startup capital to buy the extruder which compounds the hemp into your plastic cost quite a bit of money.

Matt Baum:
I would guess.

Andrew Bader:
So I just started doing the research and figured out how much the resins will cost and the hemp fiber will cost, and all the ins and outs of how to get hemp plastic production going here. It’s Nebraska, so we got a lot of farm ground to the crop.

Matt Baum:
It’s true. Are you getting your hemp from Nebraska?

Andrew Bader:
No, it’s South Dakota.

Matt Baum:
Okay, okay.

Making hemp filament for 3D printing

Andrew Bader:
There’s a company out there called 3D-Fuel. They work with a university in a partnership to produce the hemp filament. They compound the hemp into a PLA, which comes from cornstarch.

Matt Baum:
Okay, and what’s a PLA?

Andrew Bader:
It stands for polylactic acid. It’s a clear resin.

Matt Baum:
All right, got you.

Andrew Bader:
It is from microorganisms that break down plant starch.

Matt Baum:
Cool.

Andrew Bader:
And since corn is so abundant, one of the cheapest ways to make PLA is to break down that starch.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Andrew Bader:
And then, the company compounds it or mixes it with heat and pressure to really create a uniform substance to then make a filament out of that you can feed your 3D printer.

Matt Baum:
Okay. So you’re literally buying… I don’t know why, but I picture like hamster food pellets, almost, compressed little pieces of filament. It’s a hemp plastic. It acts just like a regular 3D printer would with plastic?

Andrew Bader:
Well, there’s many different grades of PLA. So there’s 3D printer grade and there’s injection moldable grade, then there’s a few other grades. The PLA that’s made for 3D printing, they put it through another machine that produces the filament. So you take the pellets that looks like the hamster material.

Matt Baum:
Right, it comes in a bag, right?

Andrew Bader:
Yes.

Matt Baum:
Okay. So I’m not that far off, it’s just a bunch of pellets?

Andrew Bader:
Right.

Matt Baum:
And those are fed into the 3D printer and then the 3D printer awaits your instructions and basically melts them down or does it strip them or?

Andrew Bader:
Well, first those pallets, those plastic pallets are turned into the filament. And so, it’s turned into a roll. But we also make injection moldable sunglasses. That’s when you just take those pallets and you use heat and pressure and force it into a mold.

Matt Baum:
Right, right.

Andrew Bader:
So the idea here is to create everyday items out of hemp plastic, and convert oil-based plastic to plant-based plastic.

Creating a hemp 3D printing startup

Matt Baum:
Shortly after you graduated from high school, you got interested in this? How did that happen? How did you happen across hemp and the idea of hemp plastic? We’ll get to the whole making sunglasses and why you’re doing that later. But how did you get started with this idea?

Andrew Bader:
I grew up on a farm growing corn and soybeans.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Andrew Bader:
We’re price takers. We’ve always been dependent on the market. The market tells us what they’re going to give for our product. So I was also looking for a more sustainable crop to produce, and hemp is the sustainable crop of choice for large scale production across the United States, because it requires no pesticides. It requires a fraction of the water. [crosstalk 00:06:08] requires to grow. So when you talk about sustainability, hemp is what you want.

Matt Baum:
Totally. So your family were… You grew up on a family farm, I take it?

Andrew Bader:
Yes.

Matt Baum:
What do they think about hemp then? You said they were corn and soybean people. What do they think about this? Has it been tough to try and sell them on this idea or are they on your side? Are they pro-hemp and trying to grow it here in Nebraska too?

Andrew Bader:
I’m sure they have their reservations and the words that they keep in the back of their mind that they would like to tell me, but they are open. They want to see what it can do. They want to… If it can be profitable and not be a drug or ruin people’s lives. See everything that’s good I think should be brought into the open, and eventually people will see that hemp is some of the longest, strongest and most durable of all natural fibers. It requires no pesticides or herbicides to grow. The seed is a complete protein, that means it has all the essential amino acids to build muscle .

Matt Baum:
You’ve done your homework, you know what you’re talking about here. You’re not just going into the plastic business. You did your homework, I can tell by the way you talk.

Andrew Bader:
I’ve approached this from all angles. I’ve attended many different expos. Some of the first being the NoCo Hemp Expo in Colorado.

Matt Baum:
Which one were you at? Because I was at one about… Well, not last year, but the year before. I was at that one.

Andrew Bader:
I was at the first and second and third one.

Matt Baum:
Cool. All right. So we were together at the third one then I think?

Andrew Bader:
Maybe. I heard it brings in 10,000 people. So-

Matt Baum:
Yeah, it was massive, it was huge.

Andrew Bader:
… you can get lost.

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Andrew Bader:
Hopefully they have it this year. Well, they had to cancel this year’s. But next year hopefully, they’ll have it.

Matt Baum:
Hopefully, it will be back. Yeah, it is a good time. So when you went there, is that where you started to formulate this idea for a 3D printing business that could just start putting together every day items?

Andrew Bader:
No, I was always looking for that opportunity to get in the market without spending a large amount of time and money to get involved. And eventually, 3D field started producing this hemp filament maybe in 2018. Or 2017 I think they put out their first rolls. In 2018, I really got started just making the sunglasses, perfecting the process. I wanted to do CBD. I wanted to actually make the hemp plastic. But in the end, my role just came down to this.

The challenges of a small hemp business

Matt Baum:
Fair enough. So you said, you wanted to start up a business like this and you had to look at overhead. What’s it like? I know getting in the CBD business or getting into a massive industrial hemp plastic business, very expensive. What was it like for you like someone who decided, I’m going to specialize and do a certain thing? Would it be cheaper to do it this way than say to just buy plastic filament for your 3D printer and print stuff or is it more of an ecological choice as well?

Andrew Bader:
If I had the funding, I would make my own plastic because I could make it for a lot cheaper. Because if I could make it myself instead of costing a couple dollars to make an item, it would cost me a couple cents.

Matt Baum:
Of course, yeah.

Andrew Bader:
But it all comes down to how much time and money you got. Unfortunately, I hate that money runs the world. But when it comes down to it, you need funding.

Matt Baum:
Of course. So what’s your other background like, because you can’t just… This is not a thing where you sit in front of your computer and go, “Computer, make sunglasses.” And then in the printer just ba-boom! You’ve got to have some AutoCAD background or some type of architecture or design?

Andrew Bader:
So every great company, every good idea, it takes a team. You can’t do everything by yourself.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Andrew Bader:
And I work with a couple of CAD designers, my brother being one of them. Another guy in Omaha, [Roderick 00:10:20] [Ekwall 00:10:20] helped design the first model for the sunglasses. And since then, I’ve worked with a few other CAD designers. But besides just the CAD designing, just getting the printer to do exactly what you want in a nice way, and then taking it off the printer and sanding it down and getting your materials for the right price. It all takes logistics.

Matt Baum:
Of course.

Andrew Bader:
And figuring out the logistics is a big part of everything.

Matt Baum:
So you said you’re getting your hemp from South Dakota. How’d you hook up with those guys? Was it just a matter of, I want to deal with someone local, or you just got on Google and found somebody who was doing it?

Andrew Bader:
I just found 3D-Fuel, and they were making this hemp… They were selling this hemp filament. It was just fate, I guess.

Matt Baum:
I’m going to take a note on that. I’d like to get ahold of those guys, because I know South Dakota is pretty stiff with their hemp rules. So I was a little shocked when you said this was coming out of South Dakota. Their governor is-

Andrew Bader:
Let me read the box. It could be North Dakota. Entwined 3D printing filament is produced from USA-grown and process industrial hemp. The hemp filament uses no dyes allowing it to maintain a true natural brown tone with small specks of visible bio-fill.

Matt Baum:
Fair enough.

Andrew Bader:
Yes.

Matt Baum:
And you said, what’s the name of the company? I’m sorry, 3D-Fuels?

Andrew Bader:
Yeah, 3D-Fuel.

Matt Baum:
I’m going to have to look them up.

Andrew Bader:
There is also a European company called Kanesis, and that you spell that, K-A-N-E-S-I-S.

Matt Baum:
S-I-S.

Andrew Bader:
I’ve tried their filament. It’s unique in its own way. It probably has a little more bio-fill in it, but it just doesn’t perform like 3D-Fuel’s does. There’s actually another company coming online out of California that’s going to be producing this. So there’s currently three companies that can make this hemp filament-

Matt Baum:
In the world, there’s three companies?

Andrew Bader:
In the world, in the world.

Matt Baum:
That’s crazy. It just seems like if this is going to… If this can do what we think it can do and you’re making sunglasses out of it… I have a pair, they’re fantastic, and they’re lighter, but they seem stronger than most plastic sunglasses I’ve had, I got to say. If we can do this, does that mean hemp plastic is kind of limitless in what it can do to replace other plastics in your opinion?

Andrew Bader:
Well, you probably wouldn’t want to build a spaceship out of it.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. We’re not building spaceships out of plastic. I guess as far as replacing normal plastic as we think about them.

Andrew Bader:
If you can process hemp in the right way, you can make plastics though that are very competitive for aerospace engineering products.

Matt Baum:
That’s-

Andrew Bader:
But this filament and this plastic I use, the hemp is just a filler. So it reduces the amount of resin needed. It brings down the cost of the plastic. It brings down the weight of the plastic. If you can process the fiber down to pure level and incorporate it into your plastic, it can add strength to it, so tensile, flexural, impact strength. Henry Ford as we all know used… Built his first Model T out of a natural fiber plastics being a mix of hemp, kenaf and maybe flax, maybe sisal. He took a sledgehammer to that thing and in the video, it just bounces off.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, no dent or anything. It was really cool. So what do you-

Andrew Bader:
So with the right technology, hemp plastic could be limitless.

3D printing hemp with Corfiber

Matt Baum:
So what are you guys making right now? What are you producing for a hemp vision? Is it just sunglasses or you’re getting into other stuff too?

Andrew Bader:
We make about four or five different models of sunglasses, then we make earrings in all the element forms. So fire, wind, tree, [crosstalk 00:14:38] mountains.

Matt Baum:
Cool.

Andrew Bader:
But we also make vases, business card holders, salt dishes, coasters, coaster holders, bottle openers, [crosstalk 00:14:49]-

Matt Baum:
It’s great, like looking around office to see everything. I love it.

Andrew Bader:
… key chains and we just started making chess pieces and chess boards.

Matt Baum:
I did see that. That was out there at the farmer’s market as well. Very cool.

Andrew Bader:
It’s been one of the hot items. People really are picking up on that chess set.

Matt Baum:
So how many printers do you have right now?

Andrew Bader:
Eight.

Matt Baum:
You have eight of them. And you can literally take any 3D printer and put this filament in? It doesn’t have to be a special printer?

Andrew Bader:
No. Yeah, this is pretty… I use pretty basic printers. But not any printer because there’s some printers that use liquid resin.

Matt Baum:
Oh, okay.

Andrew Bader:
And some companies make their 3D printers so you can only put in a certain kind of filament that they produce. They make the opening smaller and make it difficult to use other kinds of filament.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Andrew Bader:
I challenge anybody to buy a 3D printer and start making items out of hemp plastic.

Special thanks to Blue Forest Farms

Matt Baum:
That’s really cool. Let’s take a quick break so we can talk about our partner this week, Blue Forest Farms. Blue Forest Farms prides itself on a full seed to shelf process that is completely organic, from selectively breeding their own high quality varietals, growing their plants locally in their Sunkist organic Colorado farms, monitoring the state of the art extraction process and even engineering the best tasting formulas. Blue Forest Farms or BFF as we call them in-house at Ministry of Hemp ensures quality at every step in the CBD product creation process. They even have a very cool numbering system that helps you figure out what’s your number based on their six different CBD oils.

Matt Baum:
Maybe you’re looking for a full spectrum unrefined hemp oil, or you’re looking for pure CBD isolate with absolutely no THC, or maybe you would be interested in their new sleep formula. It’s a CVN Advanced Formula Number Six, their latest organic CBD oil. They sent me some and I’ve been using it. I’ve got to say I’ve been sleeping very well, which is great, because I just ran out of my other one. Blue Forest Farms has a CBD oil that is perfect for any of your needs. You can find more information about their farm, the genetics, and how their extraction process works over at blueforestfarms.com. And then head over to bffhemp.com and check out and buy their products.

Matt Baum:
By the way, if you use the code ministry at checkout right now, you’ll get 20% off your first purchase just for listening to this show. Head to bffhemp.com, and of course we’ll have links to that in the show notes for this episode and use the code ministry to get 20% off your first purchase. You guys are always contacting me and asking, “Matt, where can I get good CBD? Who is a good CBD company?” Blue Forest Farms is fantastic. We are proud to be partnering with them and I am so excited to recommend them to you guys. Again, had to bffhemp.com. Check out their whole line of CBD oils, including their latest, Number Six which combines the benefit of CBD with a concentrated amount of CBN that’s going to help you get to sleep. Don’t forget to use the code ministry at checkout to get 20% off. Let them know you listen to Ministry of Hemp.com to get your information and you want to support businesses that support us. And now back to my interview with Andrew Bader. So how long did it take to make the sunglasses that I bought?

3D printing hemp sunglasses

Andrew Bader:
The prototyping took about a year. I’m a farmer by trade. So I’ve made these on the side and I continue to do that when I get home. After a long day’s work, I turn on all the printers, get them all going and start sanding and assembling the sunglasses.

Matt Bader:
So how long does it take to actually print one pair of sunglasses, start to finish? You turn on the printer and you go, “Computer, sunglasses,” or whatever you do? How long does it take to actually print it out?

Andrew Bader:
One pair takes about 60 minutes.

Matt Baum:
Oh, really?

Andrew Bader:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
Is that based on… Is that the kind of thing where the technology is going to get better and it’ll be faster or is it because of the nature of the shape or the plastic itself?

Andrew Bader:
Well, that is not the limiting factor. If I get all my eight printers going printing sunglasses four at a time, I’ll wake up with almost 30 pairs of sunglasses. And then every two hours, you get four sunglasses off of one printer. So-

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure.

Andrew Bader:
… then the limiting factor becomes labor.

Matt Baum:
Sanding it down, putting the lenses in and stuff like that?

Andrew Bader:
Yeah. So with 3D printing, I can multiply my printers and get all I need from there.

Matt Baum:
Sure. But it will probably be a faster process in the future as 3D printers get better. Right?

Andrew Bader:
I hope so. When you speed up… I can make these sprinters go real fast and put in only 10% infill. I could probably make them 10 times faster, but the quality goes down. There’s a balance between quality and speed and-

How 3D printing works

Matt Baum:
You said the word infill. Tell me what that means. Literally, I’ve seen 3D printers work. They blow my mind. It melts my brain when I see them in action. But I realize I have no idea how they actually work.

Andrew Bader:
So when you start printing an item, you got your first layers. Those are all 100%. Every inch is covered. And then after those first four or five layers, then the printer starts just making a square-shaped instead of complete infill.

Matt Baum:
Okay. So it’s like almost weaving it around a skeleton?

Andrew Bader:
Yeah, it’s like a honeycomb.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Andrew Bader:
So on the outside of a bee’s nest, it’s all solid. But when you crack it open, it’s a honeycomb.

Matt Baum:
Awesome. So once you have your plans and you’ve set up your 3D dimensional design, you literally feed that into the computer, set it, forget it and just let it start printing? You go to bed and wake up in the morning and you’ve got a bunch of sunglasses there?

Andrew Bader:
Heck yeah. And then, I turned them on and go to work, and I come back from work and there’s a whole bunch more.

Matt Baum:
That is awesome. So they print out… I’m picturing… What I’m picturing is ridiculous. It’s like a cartoon assembly line or something with a bunch of hammers and whatever. But the printer prints it out and then it just spits it on to a little conveyor belt or something?

Andrew Bader:
That would be the dream [crosstalk 00:21:53] if the 3D printer could dump what it printed off, scrape it off and restart itself, that would be awesome. But no, after it’s done printing, you got to scrape each print off.

Matt Baum:
Okay, okay.

Andrew Bader:
And restart it.

Matt Baum:
So what’s next for you? Right now, you’re new, you’re working out of the basement. You’re getting the word out there. You’re going to farmer’s markets. I feel like the response has been really cool.

Andrew Bader:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. I would like to bring the price down so injection molding is going to happen. I like how I can test the market with 3D printing and see which items and designs people like before I go buy that $10,000 mold.

Matt Baum:
Sure, Jesus. I get that.

Andrew Bader:
[crosstalk 00:22:37].

Matt Baum:
I totally get that. So that’s the plan right now is 3D print some stuff for proof of concept more or less?

Andrew Bader:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Matt Baum:
I paid $20 for my sunglasses. That’s not a lot to pay for sunglasses. I don’t mind paying that at all.

Andrew Bader:
No, but some tourist shops, so I guess they buy their sunglasses for 12 cents. So-

Matt Baum:
Yeah. There-

Andrew Bader:
… it’s hard to compete with the oil-based sunglasses.

Matt Baum:
Do you think that’s going to be the biggest hurdle is trying to explain to people, yes, they’re more expensive, but the idea is we’re making something that’s better for the environment, that replaces plastic? What’s that conversation like right now? Have you had trouble with those hurdles?

Andrew Bader:
Everybody’s on board with making plant-based plastics.

Matt Baum:
Right? That’s awesome.

Andrew Bader:
So I think it’s all about exposure.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Andrew Bader:
And hopefully, we can get our economy turned around and-

Matt Baum:
That would be nice.

Andrew Bader:
And then, it’ll all come together in time.

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure. So when you start to move to injection molding, now we’re talking like, you can’t do that in your basement. That’s going to be like, you need a warehouse or something. Right? I don’t know how that works either to be quite honest.

Andrew Bader:
No. Actually, if you want to get it down to a couple dollars a pair, you want automated injection molding machines. But you can buy injection molding machines that you can use your hand with. It’s just like a big press.

Matt Baum:
Okay. I’ve seen guys do that with action figures on online and stuff, real nerds that want to make their own action figures, have an injection mold press. Is the plastic just the same thing? It’ll work with hemp plastic the same way?

Andrew Bader:
It’s a different grade.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Andrew Bader:
It’s a different process. It’s a total different designing, different CAD software, different molds.

Matt Baum:
Of course.

Andrew Bader:
No molds in 3D printing.

Matt Baum:
But you’re building the mold as opposed to building out… It’s like you’re almost building it inside out. Whereas your 3D printing, you’re making a skeleton and telling the printer, build this. The mold is actually going to be like what the skeleton will be, the inside of it, more or less? And you pour the goop in and it dries or cools or whatever, and the you have sunglasses.

Andrew Bader:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
So do you know where you’re going to be getting the… You’re not going to get that plastic from the same place, I would guess? It’s two different companies?

Andrew Bader:
Two different companies and we’re hopefully bringing on another company.

Taking the risk of investing in hemp

Matt Baum:
Cool. And are there more people doing injection grade stuff than the 3D printer stuff right now? I would guess there would be.

Andrew Bader:
There’s only a few companies doing it.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Andrew Bader:
Like the 8000Kicks guy, finding a supply of hemp fiber, it seems to be the limiting factor here.

Matt Baum:
Totally.

Andrew Bader:
And a lot of the established companies don’t want to take the risk.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Andrew Bader:
And plus they’re already having good income streams doing what they do.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Andrew Bader:
So it’s going to take new companies with new investment to bring the hemp plastic into the world.

Matt Baum:
Well, it seems like just new companies with new investment but new companies with an ecological mind where they’re saying like, look, like you said, this is going to be a little more expensive. There’s no way around it, but we’re doing something different with real benefit.

Andrew Bader:
I think we can get it down to oil-based prices, but-

Matt Baum:
Really?

Andrew Bader:
Oh yeah, absolutely. The hemp fiber, you can make for dirt cheap. Like in Canada, where the grow hemp through seed, they burn for fiber. They just pile on that fiber up in the corner of the field and burning it.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Andrew Bader:
And the Colorado Hemp Company, they [inaudible 00:26:36] use waste material to make their plastic. It’s nothing special.

Matt Baum:
So this is just a matter of, we don’t have people processing it? That’s the biggest problem?

Andrew Bader:
Yes, it’s all going to take that money into the processing.

Matt Baum:
Good Lord. And once that happens, then sky’s the limit. Then you can make 12 cent sunglasses basically?

Andrew Bader:
Games on.

Matt Baum:
Wow. So you’re trying to get in on this now at the very ground floor as it’s developing so when that does get in place, you’re already there, you’re ready to go?

Andrew Bader:
Yeah, I think we’re developing a good amount of market knowledge to know what bites and what doesn’t.

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure.

Andrew Bader:
So I’ll we’ll know where that hemp plastic has demand and where it might not.

The future of Corfiber

Matt Baum:
So what’s next for you guys, what’s your plan?

Andrew Bader:
Can make everything, every day items out of hemp plastic, so cups, anything.

Matt Baum:
You want to go for it, full on industrial, just let’s replace plastic with hemp, whatever we can make?

Andrew Bader:
Absolutely. And it’s going to take… There’s a niche for everybody. There’s a spot in the market for everybody.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Andrew Bader:
There’s people making hemp toothbrushes.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. I’ve seen those.

Andrew Bader:
… and shoes and sunglasses. So it’s common.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, whether we like it or not, it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of waiting for the processing to catch up to the demand. Right?

Andrew Bader:
Yeah. We might like it, but DuPont might not like it.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Well, they’ve had their time in the sun, right?

Andrew Bader:
Yeah, it’s time for them to get gone.

Matt Baum:
Most definitely. Yeah, I appreciate you coming on the show, man. And we will have a link obviously in the show notes so people can check out your sunglasses. Right now, are farmer’s markets and stuff, is that the only place you can really get them outside of the website or are they anywhere else?

Andrew Bader:
They’re on Etsy and a few CBD shops on Lincoln and Omaha.

Matt Baum:
Cool, that’s very cool.

Andrew Bader:
We’re trying to get into the NoCo Hemp Expo if they have it next year.

Matt Baum:
Fair enough, make some inroads into some other buyers and stores and stuff?

Andrew Bader:
Absolutely. But we’re trying to be in to every CBD shop across the country.

Matt Baum:
That’s cool. That’s a good idea too, because anyone that’s going to a CBD shop already knows hemp, digs hemp, or is at least curious about it. And when they see it can do stuff like that, I think it really blows people’s minds when… Especially since I was wearing the sunglasses the other day, I was at the dog park. A guy I know that brings his dog up there was like, “What are those?” Because they look different. They don’t look like plastic. They look like brown, flecked. They’re really cool looking. And I told him,-

Andrew Bader:
Yeah, [crosstalk 00:29:17] plastic.

Matt Baum:
… “These are made of hemp.” Yeah.

Andrew Bader:
It’s almost like blood.

Matt Baum:
Totally. And he said, “Are those made of wood?” And I said, “No, they’re made of hemp plastic.” And he said, “What does that mean?” And I blew his mind. I said, “Yeah, there’s a guy right here in town making these and he does it with a 3D printer. It’s literally the plant turned into plastic.” I think the more people learn about this, the more excited they’re going to get

Andrew Bader:
Yes. And we’re now starting to produce those injection molded sunglasses.

Matt Baum:
That’s very cool. Let me ask you, is the final product different than the 3D printed one? Does it look like the same color I assume? But what’s the grade plastic like?

Andrew Bader:
No, injection molded ones are darker.

Matt Baum:
Oh really?

Andrew Bader:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Matt Baum:
Okay. You could-

Andrew Bader:
They look and feel different.

Matt Baum:
Do they feel just like regular plastic?

Andrew Bader:
No, it’s a mixture of a wood feeling mixed with a plastic feeling. It’s a unique one of a kind. You can’t really describe it.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, I’ve noticed that. Like I said, it feels lighter in your hand, but it also feels stronger. I’ve had cheap… We’ve all had cheap, crappy, plastic sunglasses that they’re heavy on your face and whatever, and then they just break for some reason on your body.

Reducing waste with hemp plastic

Andrew Bader:
Yeah, which is unfortunate. So I heard all your stats on how much… 300 million shoes go into the landfill. I wonder how many sunglasses go into the landfill.

Matt Baum:
It’s got to be insane. Because for years, think about it. I never spent money on sunglasses because they broke all the time. And so I never understood people who were like, I want a $200 pair of sunglasses. Mine are going to get thrown in the car. They’re going to get scratched. And when I lose them, I’m going to feel like I’m dying inside because I spent $200. You know?

Andrew Bader:
Right, we always need a subscription base-

Matt Baum:
Totally.

Andrew Bader:
… if you lose or break your sunglasses. You send them into us and we’ll ship out another pair for [crosstalk 00:31:14].

Matt Baum:
Totally, that’s a great idea. Yeah, because I know whenever I bought… I would buy cheap 5, 6, $7 sunglasses. They break and I just throw them away and not even think about it. And then they’d be in a landfill for 1,000 years. It’s insane.

Andrew Bader:
And we can grind those sunglasses, those broken sunglasses up and reuse them.

Matt Baum:
Really?

Andrew Bader:
Reuse the plastic.

Matt Baum:
Combine it with hemp plastic?

Andrew Bader:
Well, it’s already hemp plastic. We just put it through a grinder.

Matt Baum:
You’re talking about… I’m sorry, your sunglasses? If I were to send you broken ones, you can literally grind them up and use it again?

Andrew Bader:
The injection molded ones, yes.

Matt Baum:
That’s really cool, just melt it down and make it something again.

Andrew Bader:
Right. And my brother’s actually using recycled plastic too to make sunglasses.

Matt Baum:
That’s very cool.

Andrew Bader:
So we’re using hemp plastic and recycled plastic to make the world a better place.

Matt Baum:
That is awesome. Like I said, I appreciate you coming on the show. This is great. I’m glad someone’s doing this locally. I’m sorry, there’s not more producers out there to help you. What can we do in that? Is there anything we can do at this point to get producers and to get industry just looking at this? Is it a matter of just continuing to buy these products and show them that there’s money there?

Andrew Bader:
I think there’s opportunity for a public private investment. Like the ethanol companies, the government worked with private companies to build all those ethanol plants to create cleaner burning fuel.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Andrew Bader:
That has helped clean up our air pollution tenfold.

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Andrew Bader:
And I think if the government would take a serious look at hemp and with other private companies… I wish producers and government agencies would approach hemp like they do corn and soybeans, because the potential is there to be as big as corn and soybeans. And-

Matt Baum:
Totally.

Andrew Bader:
… if we can take a more collective effort at this, it’d be more successful. Right now, you’ve got a whole bunch of entrepreneurs using every last dime and penny in their pocket to get their company up and going, but then they have… They hit roadblocks and it goes nowhere.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, I hear you. So speaking as a farmer from that aspect, you grew up with corn. You grew up with soybeans. Do you see farmers clamoring for this or saying, yeah, we are [inaudible 00:33:43] this and yes, I agree with you, the government should do something similar like they did for corn and soybeans? Do you hear a lot of that as a farmer or are farmers kind of resistant and just waiting to see what happens? Are they scared?

Andrew Bader:
They’re definitely scared to change their whole operation. When you’re growing corn and soybeans, you’re buying combines and planters that can grow hemp or grow corn and soybeans. But a lot of the same equipment can be used for hemp. It really would take a specialized harvester.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Andrew Bader:
And farmers want to see profit. They know year in and year out that they’re going to make money off corn and they can take it somewhere at the end of the growing season. Right now, if you’re a hemp farmer, you put that seed in the ground, comes harvest time and you might not have a place to take it. So-

Matt Baum:
Yeah, that’s scary.

Andrew Bader:
… if we can give them guaranteed contracts, if we can prove to them that it can be profitable, yeah, I think they’ll definitely hop on board.

Matt Baum:
So they change the laws, we’ll say tomorrow, and you can go to your family and you go, “Mom, dad, enough of this corn business, enough of this soybeans. We’re growing hemp. The laws are changed.” Are your parents going for it or are they going, “That’s nice, sweetie. We’ll talk about it.”?

Andrew Bader:
I think there’s places that it’ll grow better.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Than Nebraska really?

Andrew Bader:
Well, in Western Nebraska, the land is cheaper.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Andrew Bader:
It’s just cheaper out there. Around Eastern Nebraska, we got highly productive soil that can be used to produce highly yielding crops.

Matt Baum:
Sure, sure.

Andrew Bader:
I think if we could take land that’s underutilized and grow hemp with it, that would be the best solution.

Matt Baum:
I totally agree. Yeah. Sandy soil out West and over farmed soil.

Andrew Bader:
And hemp loves sandy soil here. And here by the river, you don’t want to pump thousands of dollars into fertilizer, seeds and [inaudible 00:35:46] away, but just grow some hemp out there and [inaudible 00:35:53].

Matt Baum:
It’s a weed, and it’s going to grow?

Andrew Bader:
Absolutely. There was some hemp growing in the corner of one of our soybean fields one year and it was 15 feet tall and not a weed under it.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, yeah. We talked about that with a guy a while ago that was on the show that was talking about how his father actually worked for University of Kansas. They had a government grant basically to try and kill wild hemp, and this was when the prohibition was just kicking in. They literally put poison in packs on students and sent them out to spray hemp plants with it and they couldn’t kill it. It wouldn’t die. It kept coming back. This was leftover hemp from back in the day that was grown by hemp farmers by the river and stuff like that where they couldn’t grow vegetables as well, or they couldn’t grow corn or soybeans as well. They grew hemp in their crappy fields and it was unstoppable. So maybe that’s how we save Western Nebraska. I don’t know. I hope so.

Andrew Bader:
Yes, and if corn and soybean prices ever dropped, we can start producing hemp right here in Eastern Nebraska.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely, absolutely. Andrew, it’s been really good talking with you, man. I don’t want to keep you all night. You’re a farmer. You’re hardworking guy. I get it. Keep printing those sunglasses, and we appreciate you coming on the show, man. I appreciate what you’re doing right here in Nebraska. It’s so great to see somebody doing it.

Andrew Bader:
Thanks for having me. We’ll see what we can do with it.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
Most definitely. I want to thank Andrew again for coming on the show. It was really cool to talk to somebody this early in their startup that’s doing something that I didn’t realize pretty much anyone could do from their basement right now with hemp plastic. And if you want to hear more about that story I was telling Andrew about Kansas and their half-cocked plan to stamp out wild hemp back in the day, check out my Kansas Hemp Stories podcast featuring Kelly Ripple. It’s a great episode. And of course, I’ll have links to it in the show notes for this episode.

Matt Baum:
Thank you for tuning in to another exciting episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcasts. We’ll be back next week where hopefully, I’m going to be talking about Delta-8-THC. Well, it’s new and quite honestly, I don’t know a whole lot about it. But good news is we have a Delta-8 FAQ, F-A-Q that is, over at ministryofhemp.com. You should go check out right now so to get you a primer for the discussion we’re going to have. I know I need to read it because I know very little on the subject. Also huge thanks to BFF, Blue Forest Farms, for partnering with us today. Don’t forget to check out BFF hemp and use that code ministry to get 20% off your first purchase.

Matt Baum:
And if you want to say thanks to us, you could head over to patreon\ministryofhemp and become a Ministry of Hemp Insider. Any amount you give supports this show, it makes you an insider and it gets you access to podcast extras. It gets you access to early articles and all kinds of extra stuff that we put up there. It is the best way to show that you not only care about hemp and this information, but you want other people to hear it too and you support people that are out there educating and telling the truth about hemp and how it really can change the world. And thank you to everybody that already is a Ministry of Hemp Insider. I’ll have a link to our patreon in the show notes as well.

Matt Baum:
And speaking of our show notes, here at Ministry of Hemp, we believe that an accessible world is a better world for everyone. So you can find a complete written transcript of this episode in the show notes as well. And if that’s not enough, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram. We’re all over the place and we’re always posting great hemp educational stuff and reposting our buddy stuff too. So it’s a great way to find new labels, hear news from other sites we trust and work with and stay up on all the hemp news. That’s about it for this episode. I like to get out of here the same way every time. I always say, remember to take care of yourself, take care of others and make good decisions, will you? This is Matt Baum with the Ministry of Hemp signing off.

The post 3D Printing Hemp Plastic, With Andrew Bader of Corfiber appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

Shoes. We all wear them, some even collect hundreds of pairs. But did you know up to 300 million pairs of shoes make their way to landfills every year. According to thechicecologist.com shoes make up a massive portion of waste in landfills and some elements of athletic shoes can take up to 1000 years to decompose.

In this episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, Matt sits down with Bernardo Carreira, CEO of 8000Kicks, to discuss their new line of hemp fabric-based shoes with bio-plastic soles. They talk about the impact an ecologically friendly shoe can have on the environment, the difficulties of running a start-up with a mission, and the ways hemp and bioplastic continue to prove to be sustainable replacements for oil-based plastics and fibers.

Update: Due to popular demand, 8000Kicks provided us with a coupon code. Use coupon ‘moh10‘ to get 10% off their hemp shoes!

You’ve got hemp questions? We’ve got hemp answers!

Send us your hemp questions and you might hear them answered on one of our Hemp Q&A episodes. Send your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, matt@ministryofhemp.com, or call us and leave a message at 402-819-6417. Keep in mind, this phone number is for hemp questions only and any other inquiries for the Ministry of Hemp should be sent to info@ministryofhemp.com

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Sustainable hemp shoes: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 58 of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, “Hemp Shoes Are Part Of A More Sustainable Future”:

Matt Baum:
I’m Matt Baum. And, this is the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, brought to you by ministryofhemp.com, America’s leading advocate for hemp and hemp education. Welcome back to the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. My name is Matt Baum. And, today on the show, we are going to talk about shoes, specifically shoes made of hemp. But before we get into that, let’s talk about shoes for a minute. I love shoes. I’m a huge shoe guy. I’m not like walk-in closet full of shoes, kind of guy; but I do love shoes, Adidas, Nike, Vans. I’m a huge fan. I hold on to them. I keep them clean. I like them to look good, but eventually they do get old. And then, I get rid of them. Oftentimes, I’ll take them to a secondhand clothing store. I try not to just throw them away. I’ll donate them. But, until I started working on this episode, I honestly didn’t even think about how much plastic goes into shoes, and how long they stick around.

Matt Baum:
According to thechicecologist.com, it’s estimated that 20 billion pairs of shoes are produced annually, with roughly 300 million pairs ending up in landfills, after they’ve been worn. The ethylene vinyl acetate, which usually makes up the mid-sole of most running shoes can last for as long as a thousand years in a landfill, a thousand years. And, that is absolutely insane. The good news is, there’s people out there that are worried about this, and thinking about it, and have even started making a more ecologically responsible shoe. Today on the show, my conversation is with Bernardo Carreira. He’s a CEO of 8000Kicks, and 8000Kicks are making an all-purpose athletic shoe, if you will, out of hemp and algae-based plastic, and they’re pretty fricken amazing. 8000Kicks is a startup, and Bernardo is super pumped about what’s in store for the future. I’m really excited for you to hear this interview. Here’s my conversation with Barnardo Carreira, CEO of 8000Kicks.

Meet Bernardo Carreira

Bernardo Carreira:
Okay. That’s a good question, and I’m currently stuck in Portugal because of COVID Portugal.

Matt Baum:
You’re stuck in Portugal. So, where would you be normally without this COVID business? Where would you be?

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah, actually I’m Portuguese. I’m here because my family is here.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Bernardo Carreira:
Otherwise, I would be in the U.S. We have currently, doing some hemp production in China, so I will be in the U.S. or China. But now, I cannot go to either one’s. [crosstalk 00:00:02:55].

Matt Baum:
Got to love it, right. Which makes business really easy, I’m sure.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah, of course. It’s much easier.

Matt Baum:
Tell me about, 8000Kicks. What do you guys do there? We know that you make a hemp shoe. I have some on the way, and I’m super excited. But, tell me about 8000Kicks. What goes on there?

Bernardo Carreira:
Okay. It’s a [inaudible 00:03:17] because a lot of things go in there. But, let me describe a little bit of what we do. What is the shoe that we do? It started out as an idea, how can we make a super shoe that is eco-friendly, and meets all the needs of active person, a millennial that wants to go to work; and then, go to go for a hike in the mountain.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Bernardo Carreira:
And, a shoe for traveling, a shoe for a business, a shoe that I can wear, whatever. And, I don’t when I wear like 10 pairs of sneakers or 10 different flip-flops, every time I want to go to a different place.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Bernardo Carreira:
So, that’s the need that we faced. And, we wanted something sustainable. Because, guess what? We are millennials and we care about… We want to do things properly.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. That’s our cross to bear. We were actually care about this stuff, right?

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. Not just millennials, but it’s super awesome to see that everyone nowadays cares about this. And, our team is young and we’re like, “Let’s do things the way we want the world to be.” And, that’s how it all started. And, it all started with a stupid brainstorming session when someone had the idea of…. We’re all smoking…. Yeah, we’re a bit high there, right. Then someone came up with the idea.

Matt Baum:
That happens. I get it.

Bernardo Carreira:
Let’s make a smokable shoe, the kind of ideas that you would have when you high.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

The creation of 8000Kicks hemp shoes

Bernardo Carreira:
And, that’s how we kind of joined cannabis to the equation. Back then, we didn’t really know what we wanted to do exactly. But, we just had a stupid idea of make it, hemp. And certainly, we realized that hemp is not only eco-friendly, but it’s also super strong, super durable, and it’s also cool.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Its very cool.

Bernardo Carreira:
Right. So, we’re like, “Okay, this is us.” “This is what we need.” And, certainly the products are changing. And okay, we need to add more. Let’s make it waterproof, because personally I lived two years in London. And, hey man, London has a big problem, which is, it rains all the time.

Matt Baum:
It rains all the time. Yeah.

Bernardo Carreira:
Day one, day two, day three, like 365 days a year.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Its also sunny everyday, too. It’s weird, because the day starts up beautiful, then it rains. Then it’s beautiful, then it rains again. It’s so weird.

Bernardo Carreira:
Exactly. How can you have like a pair of canvas shoes? I don’t know, like a pair of All Stars. The moment you step outside, you’re soaked wet, and it’s super annoying. And, at the same time, you want to do different stuff, but after you’re wearing an All Stars for a long time, your feet kind of feel a little bit sore. So, you want to have more than that, in terms of comfort. And, we started like innovating, okay, “Let’s make something better.” Then, okay, we decide make it waterproof, but what’s next? What can we make it? And then, we decided to initially we were working with a recycled rubber sole, but now we did a crazy upgrade, where we use algae. We literally collect seaweed…

Matt Baum:
Algae, like seaweed?

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah, exactly.

Matt Baum:
Oh my God. I didn’t know this part.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. That was a crazy innovation. You were like, “We need to stand out even more.” So, we partner with this company called Bloom, and they collect algae from algal blooms.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Bernardo Carreira:
Why are we doing this? Because algae, first it destroys the entire ecosystem if it grows exponentially, in algal blooms. And at the same time, it has some interesting properties that we can use to make it super light. And, that’s exactly what we’ve done. We decided to incorporate some of these algae, to make what we call, bloom foam. This is the name of our project.

Matt Baum:
That’s great.

Bernardo Carreira:
And so, it’s really light. Once you receive it, you will see the shoe is like a feather. It’s really interesting.

Making eco-friendly hemp shoes

Matt Baum:
So, lets talk about that for a second. Let’s talk about everything that goes into it. First of all, you just decide, we want to make an eco-friendly shoe, but it needs to be waterproof, it needs to do everything. This isn’t just a running shoe. This is a all around shoe. And then you decide, we want to go with hemp. And you said, “You’re dealing with hemp growers in China.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah.

Matt Baum:
How do you hook up with hemp growers in China? How does that work? Dude, [crosstalk 00:00:08:13]…

Bernardo Carreira:
[crosstalk 00:08:15] figuring it out, because I wish I knew, but it’s just knocking doors.

Matt Baum:
Just find [crosstalk 00:08:22] the right company.

Bernardo Carreira:
This was the number one struggle we had with our project. From the moment we had the idea of making a smokable shoe, until the moment that we actually had a prototype, that was like six months.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Bernardo Carreira:
So, it’s hard.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Bernardo Carreira:
I mean, you can Google and you will find a lot of hemp manufacturers. The real problem is to understand the ones that actually make it good. The ones that make, what do you need, what we need. And then, you have to also understand the one that has, I mean, the good quality. And, there is the process that takes time. And then, you also have another problem, which is once you find the right one, and the one that does it well, water-proofs with the technology that you want, and you can develop the fabric the way you want; then you realize, “Okay, but we need a huge minimum order for you. And, if that was like, [crosstalk 00:09:22] really, really, really complicated.

Matt Baum:
It’s got to makes sense money-wise, too. You can’t charge $5,000 for a pair of shoes. You’ve got to figure out how to bring the price down, so.

Bernardo Carreira:
Exactly. And, the thing is they don’t let you order 10 meters. You need to order 1000 meters at once. And, that is minimum order quantities. And, that was a big struggle for us. Because, for us to achieve that quality, we had to develop from scratch. To develop from scratch, you need big quantities.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Bernardo Carreira:
So, it was tough, very tough. But now, we get the ball rolling, so we can now focus on bringing more innovation, and bringing more products, and continue this iteration process, and improve every step of the way.

Sneakers with bioplastic soles

Matt Baum:
Tell me about the algae bloom plastic. How did you find that? Initially, did you think, maybe we can do it with hemp foam, or hemp rubber, or something?

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. We had a lot of ideas. It’s kind of, we brainstorm a lot. And then, kind of saw this company doing this interesting stuff, and they were exploring like…. It was kind of random, I will honestly tell you. It’s like, you literally see something, okay, this is interesting, “I’m going to dig into that.”

Bernardo Carreira:
And, I sent them a few emails, and they replied, “Oh, this is interesting too.” So, we start developing it. And, this was exactly one year ago.

Matt Baum:
And, where are they out of?

Bernardo Carreira:
They’re based in the U.S.

Matt Baum:
Okay.

Bernardo Carreira:
And, they collect algae from like this algae blooms, all over the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Matt Baum:
Oh, wow.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. We saw that they were doing some interesting stuff working with surfboards. Okay, we want to develop the same thing for our shoes. And, they were like, “Ah, this is interesting.” [crosstalk 00:11:28] Yeah. And, we eventually developing… Okay, we need more of this, more of that. And then, one year later, we launching this shoes with this technology.

Matt Baum:
It seems like a lot of this innovation comes from people like you who are just like, “Hey, can we do that?” “Is that something we should try?” And someone else was like, “Yeah, that’s weird, let’s try it.”

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. It’s a bit like that. But guess what, if you don’t try it, you don’t make it.

Matt Baum:
Exactly. So, you’ve got your prototype. You started producing shoes. Where are they going to go? Where can I buy 8000Kicks? What’s the challenge of getting these, into markets. Where’s it going to be be?

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. So, this is something that you’re trying to be very careful with. And, the thing here is, we want to control every single step of production, to delivery, and to the customer. And, the reason we do this, is because if problems happen, then… To be honest, we found problems where we did not really expect, and this allows us to… Look, I’m the CEO here, and I answer customer’s emails every day, which is not normal in a company. In most companies [crosstalk 00:12:46]…

Matt Baum:
Typically, not. [crosstalk 00:12:49] Every time I contact Apple, I certainly don’t get, Tim and the boys.

Bernardo Carreira:
Exactly. But, the reason I do that is, because it’s crazy, amount of problems you face from production to customer. And, we’re still trying to fix every single one of them, and make sure that they are properly sold, before we expand and start selling. So right now, only on our websites, and that’s because we control it. Customers have a experience that we can control, they can communicate directly with us.

Matt Baum:
Cool.

Bernardo Carreira:
We basically guarantee that they are a 100 percent happy with the product. We know [inaudible 00:13:31] they are using it, except if something goes wrong with the product, because sometimes it does; we are there to replace it, or change it, or whatever needs to be done. So, that’s how we want to make sure we grow, and we make sure we do it properly.

The challenges of making hemp shoes

Matt Baum:
So, you said there were problems you ran into that you couldn’t even foreseen. What was some of those issues? What were the biggest issues that you ran into?

Bernardo Carreira:
All right. That’s a big question. So, I’m going to tell you a funny story. [crosstalk 00:14:02] When we were shooting [crosstalk 00:14:04]…

Matt Baum:
Because success is fun, we love about success. But, the mistakes and the problem, that’s where the real story is. Right? That’s where the fun is.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah, exactly. I will tell you a funny one. So, one of the big problems we had was, we were shipping everything out of the UK. Because it’s like, okay, this seems like a no brainer. UK is competitive worldwide prices. Let’s ship the shoes from the UK to the U.S. And, knowing freight time is kind of fast. Let’s do it. Suddenly we realized, that customer’s got the shoes in the U.S. And, imagine you buy a shoe, we ship it from the UK, and it’s the wrong size.

Matt Baum:
Oh yeah, because UK sizing and U.S. sizing is different.

Bernardo Carreira:
No, not really actually. We have the shoes in U.S. sizes.

Matt Baum:
Oh, gotcha. But, I got my shoes.

Bernardo Carreira:
Sometimes, people order the wrong size.

Matt Baum:
Okay. Gotcha.

Bernardo Carreira:
So we just say, “Hey, you can ship the shoes back to us, we don’t have a return…” “Right now, we’re working and we going to launch a free return service.” But imagine that, for exchanges, we were like, “Okay, just send us a shoe back, we’re going to exchange it. And then, some customers were like, “Oh, this is impossible, “I’m paying like…”

Matt Baum:
Yeah. It’s like 20 bucks, 30 bucks to send it back to UK.

Bernardo Carreira:
And, we were like, “Oh, really?” We were like, “We’re not expecting this.” We thought it was like… Okay, we thought was kind of cheap.

Matt Baum:
Cheap for you, because you’re sending so many. But, when it’s one person sending one box, that’s a whole different story, so.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. So we were like, this is a problem because we cannot allow our customers to pay this [inaudible 00:15:49] for an exchange. I mean, if I was a customer, I’ll be a bit annoyed.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Bernardo Carreira:
This is a really funny story. I was looking for a student in the U.S., and I hired him. And I said, “Bro, I’m going to pay you to receive our shoes.” “I’m going to send you spare boxes, and I’m going to send you a cleaning kit.” “You’re going to receive the shoes, you’re going to exchange them; and you’re going to send [inaudible 00:16:21] shoe to the right customers.” And, basically we had a student working in the U.S., helping do all the exchanges for us.

Matt Baum:
It’s like own little private, like UPS hub, basically. And, it’s just like one dude, cleaning shoes, and mailing them out.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. I mean, this guy saved our life. I mean, customers were like, “Man, this is impossible.” “We cannot ship the shoes back to the UK.” And, they like [inaudible 00:16:48]. And then, we found this solution. It was really funny. You had a fulfillment center in Florida from the student, which is kind of funny.

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome. Is he still with the company, or has he graduated and moved on?

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah, he graduated.

Matt Baum:
Ah, that’s too bad. It’s hard to find good help. You know? So, have you heard…

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. We still get in touch with him, and eventually got some spare shoes. Some shoes never got used, never got shipped, so he got pretty happy with two or three pairs of shoes for himself.

Competing with other shoes

Matt Baum:
Hey, that’s not bad. Have you heard that from any of the big boys yet? Have you heard from like Adidas, or Nike, or anything? Have they been poking around, see what you’re doing? Is anyone else doing stuff like this, right now, with shoes?

Bernardo Carreira:
I mean, with hemp, there are a few companies. We already got some copycats.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, of course.

Bernardo Carreira:
Which to be honest, if it were like… I mean, it’s always like mixed feelings, right. You get a copycat, you feel like, “Oh, these guys here…”

Matt Baum:
It’s a compliment. But it’s a compliment, right? I mean, they’re saying like, “Hey, these guys have a good idea.”

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah, we see it as a complement.

Matt Baum:
“Let’s do what they’re doing.”

Bernardo Carreira:
Exactly. And to be honest, more than a compliment we see it as like these guys if they’re doing it right, and by using hemp itself, it’s just already amazing. Okay, perfect. We want to make hemp great again. If other shoe companies use hemp as well, that will be awesome. That means, we are achieving our vision of making hemp great again. And also, it’s a compliment for our business as well. And I mean, it’s a little bit like, you always feel very low, these guys are…

Matt Baum:
Right.

Bernardo Carreira:
But in the end, I think you need to take like… You cannot be selfish, and you need to be a little bit more altruistic towards what’s happening overall, rather than you.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Bernardo Carreira:
I mean, you have to understand that, it’s bigger than you, it’s bigger than you selling shoes. It’s, you’re creating something for the planet, not just for you.

Matt Baum:
If, everybody started copying you, the world would be a better place. And sure, you’ve got a lot of competition, but hey, we’ve changed the world at that point, so.

Bernardo Carreira:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
That’s not something to you know… So, have any of the big guys… Have you heard from anyone, like any major shoe producers that are looking into doing something like this?

Bernardo Carreira:
We got a few [inaudible 00:19:29]… And, to be honest, I look at it the same way. I doubt that they will make a lot of hemp shoes. But, if they start making hemp shoes, I will take it as a compliment. But, I saw some big companies buying our shoes already.

Matt Baum:
Oh, yeah.

Bernardo Carreira:
Because…

Matt Baum:
They want to check them out.

Bernardo Carreira:
Because, they buy the shoes with business email.

Matt Baum:
Oh. Come on, guys. They’re like ship to… We like Rick Shipment from Rick@nike.com. [inaudible 00:20:06].

Bernardo Carreira:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
Come on man, you got to be smarter than that.

Bernardo Carreira:
To be honest, I see it. And to be honest, it’s a compliment. I showed the team and say, “Hey guys, competition is buying our shoes.” But in the same way, we’re like, “It’s not really competition for me.” We’re doing something unique. We are doing something that we identify ourselves with. And to be honest, if everyone’s starts making hemp shoes, and they’re good for the environment, then we just…

Matt Baum:
Again.

Bernardo Carreira:
We’re moving to making more eco-friendly stuff, so that they can copy this again.

Matt Baum:
Mark that a win. Definitely. How many people out there right now are wearing your shoes? How many have you shipped so far? Roughly, you don’t have to give me a give me an exact number, but like roughly.

Bernardo Carreira:
Okay. A few thousand, cannot say for sure. Four, or 5,000.

Matt Baum:
So, this is still very new. This is like a small club of people around the world, that are checking these out [crosstalk 00:21:05].

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. Exactly.

Matt Baum:
But, what are they saying? Those who have bought them, like what’s the response to them?

Bernardo Carreira:
I don’t want to sound biased, because I will obviously say that they love them.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Bernardo Carreira:
I mean…

Matt Baum:
I didn’t think you [inaudible 00:21:20], they hate him. Oh God, it’s been a failure.

Bernardo Carreira:
Well, you can always check our reviews on the Trustpilot. Those, we cannot control.

Matt Baum:
Trustpilot, really good, definitely.

Bernardo Carreira:
People go there, and they post the reviews. And [inaudible 00:21:36] go back, I completely like [inaudible 00:21:39]. Yeah. But, so some reviews and some feedback from people that… Mostly, they all like the shoes. Some of them gave comments like, “Oh, I wish my shoe was lighter.” “Oh, I wish my shoe was…” And, this is something that we take really serious. And, that’s why we improve to, bring this new algae sole. This new [inaudible 00:22:03] is super light. Because okay, this guy is right, and he gave the… Like a few people said, “I wish the shoe was a bit lighter. And we’re Like, “They are right, we need to improve it.” And then, we make it super light.

Matt Baum:
That’s where the new soles came in. Yeah.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah.

The future of 8000Kicks shoes

Matt Baum:
So, [crosstalk 00:22:19] what was the first soul made of? Was that the recycled plastic, or recycled rubber, you said?

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. Recycled rubber. So, we changed the entire structure. And basically, we use the algae, which makes it super light. And, that was a big innovation for us, but that’s basically what happened. People complaining that it was, “Okay, this shoes could be lighter.” And we’re like, “Okay, how can we do this?” We had this company that does algae bloom foam. Then we decided, “Let’s do it.” And, that’s how it started.

Matt Baum:
So, what’s the plan?

Bernardo Carreira:
The other things, were the small things, people said that, “The cork rubber was very good, very interesting, but they wish it was a little bit more cushioning.” Which to be honest, I did not really expect. But, after reasoning with the customers, I understood that it didn’t have the feel that they wanted. So, we were like, “How can we improve this?” So, I mean, there’s no such thing as a perfect shoe. There’s always stuff to improve.

Matt Baum:
Of course.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. And, that’s how we can improve the shoe to be a super shoe. We always like, this small detail, this small detail. And, that’s how it goes.

Matt Baum:
And, you answering the emails, you’re on the front line; so you are carrying this stuff direct. It’s not like someone is coming to you with a marker [inaudible 00:00:23:46], “Sir, 14.2 percent of the respondents said, that the shoe needs to be a little bit lighter.”

Matt Baum:
You’re just getting emails directly from customers like, “Hey man, I wish the shoe was a little lighter.” And, that kicks in a new idea to have like, “All right, how do we do that? And, it [inaudible 00:24:00]. I got to check out this algae foam. That sounds amazing. What’s next for you?

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah, you getting them shipped to your place right now.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, I know. I’m super excited. So, what’s next for you guys? Post COVID, you’re coming back to the States, and then you take over the U.S. Is that the plan? We’re all wearing hemp shoes.

Bernardo Carreira:
[inaudible 00:24:18] COVID, we’re going to make a mandatory for every farmer.

Matt Baum:
I love it.

Bernardo Carreira:
No. So, we’re still really small, right. So the idea is, we making sure that we’re bringing new colors, making sure that people like what we doing. Growing, [inaudible 00:24:40] very strong foundation. And, we have a lot of attention already, but we don’t want to outgrow what is sustainable.

Matt Baum:
Right.

Bernardo Carreira:
We want to make sure, that we have full control of what we make. And for that reason, the idea is to go to the U.S., so that we can follow up a little bit more on this process, be there with our customers, do a few more events, where we actually are in-person with the customers. Which is kind of complicated right now, because of the COVID. But, we wish we would be doing that right now.

Bernardo Carreira:
And, bring new colors. What colors do customers want? How do they feel about walking with this shoes. Do they want more like summer stuff, more like winter stuff. Of course now, it’s winter, and then summer coming, but that’s easy to say. But, what exactly is that you want for summer. But, we don’t want to make just another summer shoe, or another winter shoe; it has to be amazing. Right. Otherwise, we just making another pair of, I don’t know, sandals, or another pair of boots. I mean, [crosstalk 00:25:57].

Matt Baum:
But, these are blue. And, these are pink.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. Exactly. It has to be really high quality. Our idea is like, small amount of products, but amazing. Amazing ones. [crosstalk 00:26:15] I’m really excited for you to try them, because really, you’ve [crosstalk 00:26:17] for a long time.

Matt Baum:
I’m super excited. So, the idea is to scale up responsibly, basically. And, not outgrow the quality that you’re trying to maintain now, while also pushing the product forward.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah, exactly.

8000Kicks = 8000 B.C.

Matt Baum:
That’s amazing, man. So 8000Kicks, where’s the name come from?

Bernardo Carreira:
Okay. That’s a good question. A lot of people ask that. It actually comes from 8000 BC. That’s when hemp originated in Asia, in Taiwan, in China. Basically, hemp started back then. And we said, “Let’s honor the past, and let’s use a funky number, 8000 Kicks.”

Matt Baum:
That’s great.

Bernardo Carreira:
That’s how we came up with it.

Matt Baum:
I love it. Bernardo, can’t wait for you to get back to the States. I mean, I’m sorry you’re trapped there, but I got to get one of those hats too. I’m going to get on your site, and go order one of those hats. I’m guessing, that’s all hemp as well.

Bernardo Carreira:
The hats. Oh, these hats.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. The hat you’re wearing, yes.

Bernardo Carreira:
These ones are not for sale yet. We are developing them, but not for sale yet. And actually, we have a few ideas, funky ideas, that we want to launch. But, the hats are one of them.

Matt Baum:
Cool.

Bernardo Carreira:
But, not yet. Not yet.

Matt Baum:
Fair enough.

Bernardo Carreira:
Not right now, only the masks.

Matt Baum:
So, final question. If I’m Adidas or I’m Nike, and I come to you tomorrow; and I go, “Bernardo, this is an idea, man, how much you want?” “I’ll write you a cheque right now.” Are you selling, or are you holding onto it?

Bernardo Carreira:
To be honest, not really selling. I think if it was for the money, there will be easier ways to make money.

Matt Baum:
Absolutely.

Bernardo Carreira:
I will go to investment banking, or something like that.

Matt Baum:
Sure.

Bernardo Carreira:
But, there’s something that the big brands have, that I don’t have, and that is the access to a lot of resources, and the access to a lot of big networks. And so, although we were really committed to do amazing stuff, and we have a lot of energy and motivation; a lot of times it takes us a lot of effort to get… So, we mentioned like, these guys have big Ferrari’s, then they can have really big machines. Then basically, we don’t have big machines, so we have to run all night to catch up with it.

Matt Baum:
Right, exactly.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. So the thing is, we are really committed to quality, and by teaming up with people that have a lot of experience, that would be very good for us. So, we want to scale up the team to bring more quality. But, these big companies have a lot of resources, that can help us drive our mission. So it really, it shouldn’t be a question of money. It should be a question of, what do they bring to the table that can help us bring this project further.

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome. That’s completely awesome. So for now, if I want to buy a pair of shoes, I have to go to 8000kicks.com.

Bernardo Carreira:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
Awesome. Thanks so much.

Bernardo Carreira:
And, you buy one each color.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, I buy one each color. Deal.

Bernardo Carreira:
We’re coming up with new color’s. And, if you want to suggest any new color, feel free to reach out on Instagram, or Facebook, or just via email. Because, many times I’m there with my colleagues answering the emails.

Matt Baum:
Cool.

Bernardo Carreira:
So, you’ll probably get a message directly from me, asking you more questions, “Hey, what color?”

Matt Baum:
It sounds like you’ve got a great product, and it sounds like people are excited. I’m super excited for this. Shoes are one of those things, that I don’t think we think about enough, when we buy them. Because, they do have so much plastic, and there’s a bunch of cloth on them. And, when you get done with those shoes, they just get thrown away into a landfill. Yours, since they’re hemp and this algae plastic, do they break down better eventually, when I’m done with them? And, I’ve worn them for five or 10 years, when I’m done with them. Will they be around, as long as my Nike shoes?

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah, definitely not. They are not. However, I have to be a 100 percent transparent. The shoes are not a 100 percent natural. This is a fact, they are like 95 percent natural. Then we had to add, for instance, our membrane, it’s synthetic, so this is how we guarantee that it’s waterproof. But to be honest, we don’t mind adding that five percent extra of synthetic material to improve the features, and to make sure the product is extra good.

Matt Baum:
Yeah.

Bernardo Carreira:
And also, in many cases that also helps us reduce the CO2 footprint, which for us, is a big number.

Matt Baum:
Definitely.

Bernardo Carreira:
That’s one of our biggest KPIs. And right now, we have 4.1 kilo of CO2, kilo per shoe. And, I mean, that is a really low number. Most shoes consume 30 kilos of CO2 per production. By adding this small synthetic, we reduce a lot, the CO2 that goes out; and we increase a lot, the features of the shoes. And basically, what that does is, instead of the shoes lasting six months, they last one year, two years. So, it’s the five percent that we will rather not replace by natural materials, that do not perform as well.

Matt Baum:
But, the point being like 95 percent natural, is 95 percent more than just about every other shoe on the market. So, I’m not [crosstalk 00:32:24]…

Bernardo Carreira:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
Like, that sounds pretty good to me, so.

Bernardo Carreira:
Yeah. I mean, full transparency on our side.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. No, and that’s awesome. I mean, a lot of people wouldn’t even bring that up. I’m glad you did. But, I think it’s amazing. I’m excited to get these. I think you guys have, what looks like a really cool product. And as I know, there’s others on the market, but you’ve already sent some to some people at Ministry of Hemp, and they’re like, “I love them, I think they’re amazing.” So, I’m super excited, man. And, I look forward to…

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
I finally got my pair of, black with black sole 8000Kick hemp shoes this week, which is cool. Because, I can wear them with all my metal T-shirts, and stuff. And I got to say, I love them. They’re lightweight. They’re super comfortable. They’re a fantastic shoe. And, I feel good owning them, too. If you want to check out 8000Kicks, I will have a link to their website in the notes, for this episode.

Matt Baum:
Thanks for joining me, again for another episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. Next time on the show, I’m going to be talking to some local guys right here in Nebraska, where I’m from Ministry of Hemp is technically out of Austin, Texas, where Kit our editor in chief, and Drew, our brand managers live. But right here in Nebraska, there are some people doing some really cool stuff with hemp. So, I’m excited to talk to them. If you need more Ministry of Hemp in your life before that, head over to our site, ministryofhemp.com, and check out some really good articles we have up right now. We have an update on the side effects of CBD oil, and it talks all about whether or not CBD is safe. We also have a really interesting article about, can you overdose on CBD, if you take too much? Spoiler alert, No. But, it’s a good read. And if anybody could, it would be me, because I have a ton of it, and I’m always trying different CBD stuff for this show.

Matt Baum:
Speaking of the show, if you like what you hear, give us a rating, give us a review. It really does help, for us to get this information to people that are looking for it. And, it raises us in the search algorithms as well. And, if you really want to help us out, head to Patreon/ministryofhemp, and become a Ministry of Hemp insider. We just put up a podcast extra, today; me talking to Evan Nison from NORML. You may remember him, from last week’s episode. We talk about his San Francisco based cannabis tour guide company, that takes people on tours of local cannabis dispensaries, and farms. It’s a really cool little discussion.

Matt Baum:
And it’s our way of saying, thank you to you guys for supporting us on Patreon. You can find a link to our Patreon, in our show notes. And, speaking of the show notes, here at the Ministry of Hemp, we believe that a more accessible world is better for everyone. So, we include a full written transcript of this episode in the show notes, over at ministryofhemp.com. All right, that’s it. I got to get out of here. Thank you so much for joining me, again. And, I like to end the show the same way, every time. Remember to take of yourself. Remember to take care of others. And, make good decisions, will you? This is Matt Baum, with the Ministry of Hemp. Signing off.

The post Hemp Shoes Are Part Of A More Sustainable Future, With 8000Kicks appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

Getting back to nature is not just a catchy phrase but our absolute mindset. The inconvenient truth is our planet is drowning in plastic with no signs of slowing down. It is estimated that more than 8 BILLION METRIC TONS of plastic has been created since the early 1950’s. Nearly half of this number was made after the year 2000, according to Roland Geyer at the University of California at Santa Barbara. There is a growing problem with plastic packaging that we can no longer overlook. 

Getting back to nature needs to be more than a catchphrase.

The Absolute Nature team took a hard look in the mirror and decided to act to make more sustainable CBD. Even if what we come up with is small, changes must be made, and any change is better than doing nothing at all.

How were we to even begin? What should we do? Our meetings became less about customer acquisition and marketing strategies and more about how we can clean our own house. We became passionate about doing our best to limit and eventually remove all plastic packaging and non-biodegradable materials, in house.

Our hope in this article is to put aside selfish gains of capitalizing on a new customer base but to do our part in waking up the community. Our goal is to set up a viable path that will educate and inspire others to help cut down plastic waste within our own industry and within their own lives. We believe a sustainable CBD industry is a real possibility, if we act collectively.

Plastic pollution: A reason for action

Plastics have played a dominating role in the packaging of goods. Everything from what we eat to what we use to entertain ourselves with is built from and or coated in plastics. Plastics offer an easily sourced and low-cost solution to packaging needs that most businesses see as their only option. Plastic can be molded and colored to fit any companies branding. Low cost, easy to store, and safe to use for the most part. 

Unfortunately, plastics also have a side to them that is not as flattering. One-time use plastic packaging adds up in time with just the amount made for one person. Now multiple that on a scale of billions over 50 years and it won’t be hard to imagine the problems our grandchildren will inherit.

This is a fast-moving train that shows no signs of slowing down. 8 Billion Metric tons is hard to even comprehend, much less know where to even begin in tackling this issue. We asked Ministry of Hemp to help raise awareness of this issue and do what we can to help get this message out. 

Where to start? 

It starts with just a single step in the right direction and staying committed and disciplined to see it through. There are so many places to start and work on.

Don’t stress yourself out hitting all the points at once. Creating sustainable CBD is a process that will eat a lot of resources to achieve. Start where you can and build upon that. It took us almost a year to get here and we are still not finished! 

Sustainable CBD starts with the technology 

Our first change was not even reducing plastics!

We made our first move by cutting down our carbon footprint with the servers we use. Believe it or not, data centers account for 2% of the world’s carbon emissions, which is as much as the airline industry! Experts expect data center pollution to grow to 14% of total emissions by 2040.

With this in mind, we hired GreenGeeks for our data center needs. GreenGeeks began in 2008 and, built on a commitment to be the most eco-friendly web hosting company in the world. By 2009, GreenGeeks was recognized by the United States Environmental Agency as a Green Power Partner. GreenGeeks works with environmental foundations to purchase wind energy credits to put back into the grid three times the amount of energy Absolute Nature consumes.

This was just the first step we took in reducing our carbon footprint. 

Making CBD packing & shipping more sustainable

Our next goal was to tackle our packing/shipping procedures. We started with removing bubble wrap and Styrofoam peanuts from our shipping packages. We had to rework and set in place new policies and procedures for our warehouse employees to streamline this new way of packing and shipping product. Though this may seem like a small thing, it’s a lot harder to break old habits and start brand new ones at the drop of a hat.

We really want to praise our hard-working employees to take this change in stride! We replaced the bubble wrap with thick brown packing paper that is neatly rolled and secured shut. Then, we replaced styrofoam peanuts with now bio-degradable pellets. There is an extra cost in doing this that we have to absorb, but we believe it’s worth doing. 

Using glass instead of plastic

The next item we looked at tackling was the plastic bottles we used for our products. Our hemp flower was sold in plastic pop top bottles. We sourced glass jars to replace the plastic pop tops. This was nearly a 70% increase in packaging cost right from the start. But for us, ethics over profits.

We then removed the plastic bottles for our Fruit Chew line to also use glass jars. For pre-rolls, we use glass tubes with cork tops. Our next move is to move our softgels to glass tinted jars next.

Again, starting anywhere is better than not starting at all. We refuse to sit back and do nothing! 

We can work together to make the CBD industry more sustainable

Absolute Nature is committed to not only offer the best CBD products on the market but do it in a responsible and respectful way to the environment.

We look forward to a time in the future where our tiny ripple in the market changes to a tidal wave of change. If the hemp community works together, we can tackle sustainability head-on. We believe if we can put aside our difference and work together towards a common goal, we can achieve anything.

Try Absolute Nature CBD: Whether you’re part of a CBD brand or just an everyday hemp consumer, we hope you’ll give Absolute Nature a try! Use coupon code Ministry to get 40% off your order!

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