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.

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

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!

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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!

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.

As we’ve covered before, Kansas was once a powerhouse of hemp growing … so powerful that the state struggled for years with wild hemp growing all over during the era when the plant was illegal. Now that it’s legal again, the “Sunflower State” is quickly becoming a thriving hemp state too.

In this episode of the Ministry of Hemp podast, our host Matt talks about Robert Downy Jr’s new training center on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood and the Hemp Wool insulation they used to rehab the old building courtesy of our friends at Hempitecture. Check out Matt’s conversation with Mattie Meede from Hempitecture in this previous episode.

After that Matt has a conversation with Kelly Rippel about the state of hemp in Kansas. They talk about Kansas’ hemp history, new bills coming to the ballot to improve industrial hemp production and the difficulties of dealing with bad info and opinions coming from the opposition.

Editor’s Note: After we published this episode, Kelly sent over a few corrections via Twitter, including a correction that Kansas led the nation in bushels per acre of hemp produced in 1863 rather than 1865. Here’s a copy of the 1863 USDA crop report:

Sorry, I misspoke – it was actually 1863. Here’s that USDA ag report: pic.twitter.com/bimo2AmrYM

— ????reenthumb ????iżdm (@Greenthumb_one) July 21, 2020

About Kelly Rippel

Kelly is the Business developer of KS based Medicine Man Pharms and The Farmacy. He serves as an advisor on the Hemp Economic Development Group (HEDG) and the Kansas Cannabis Business Association (KSCBA). Kelly is the co-founder and vice president of Kansans for Hemp and the founding president of the Planted Association of Kansas. To say he’s busy fighting for hemp in Kansas is a bit of an understatement.

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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Kansas hemp stories: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete transcript of episode 47 of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast, “Kansas hemp stories”:

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 the Ministry of Hemp podcast. I’m your host, Matt Baum. And today on the show, we’re going to talk about Kansas. We’ve highlighted several other States, mainly Colorado, some Texas here and there, a lot of Kentucky, but we don’t hear about Kansas very often. So I found the perfect person to check in with, his name is Kelly Rippel. He is the vice president of the Kansas Industrial Hemp Advisory Board. But as you are going to hear in our discussion, he’s doing a lot more than that too. Kelly is a busy guy and he’s been fighting for hemp for years. Really excited for you guys to hear this conversation. But first, let’s get just about as far away from Kansas as we can in the United States and talk about California for a moment specifically, Hollywood.

Robert Downey, Jr.’s new use for hemp

Matt Baum:
You may know him better as Iron Man, but Robert Downey, Jr. has just been a part of the first hemp wool installation in a building in the United States. Now hemp wool is insulation made from hemp, but unlike fiberglass insulation, you can literally just grab it with your hands. No worries, no rashes. It’s not going to get into your skin. It’s a lot safer, easier to make. And it’s made out of hemp. The building is being turned into a training center for Downey, Jr., and undoubtedly other megastars, where they can work out and get pumped up for new roles. It was an old building called doc ski and sports, and they basically rehabbed this building, and Downey, Jr. was looking to reduce his carbon footprint by introducing hemp wool into the project. Back in episode 26 of this podcast, I spoke with Maddie Mead from Hempitecture, and Hempitecture was the firm that actually worked on this and helped install the hemp wool.

Matt Baum:
Back in February, the HEPA texture team visited the site of this commercial renovation project on Santa Monica Boulevard in LA and they worked with Downey’s subcontractors, teaching them the tools of the trade to successfully install hemp wool. And they loved it. Apparently, it was super easy to use. Like I said, it doesn’t bother anyone’s skin, so you don’t have to wear weird gloves. You just tack it up and it does the job. We’re going to be hearing a lot more about hemp wool in the near future, I’m sure, because it really is a revolutionary product. And it’s fantastic to use a product like this to rehab an old building, to offset poor construction in the past with new improved and better products that are better for the environment. Check out episode 26 of this podcast to hear more about hempcrete, hemp insulation and the firm that worked with Robert Downey, Jr. hemp a texture.

Meet Kelly Rippel, Kansas hemp advocate

Matt Baum:
My conversation on the show today is with Kelly Rippel, the vice president of the Kansas Industrial Hemp Advisory Board. But that’s not all. He’s also worked on the latest Kansas Safe Access Act SB187, which they’re trying to get onto the ballot right now that’s going to allow patients access medical cannabis through protected administration from licensed medical professionals. And he’s also the cofounder of Kansans For Hemp, which is working to pass legislation to reintroduce industrial hemp for Kansas farmers. He’s also the business developer for Medicine Man Farms, a Kansas based CBD company. So he might have more hemp knowledge than anyone I have encountered on this show. Here’s my conversation with Kelly Rippel.

Matt Baum:
Kelly, welcome to the Ministry of Health podcast. Now I did a little bit of background digging on you and you have been neck deep in hemp for a very long time. I got to know, how does this start? How does a Kansas boy decide, you know what? I’m not so into farming, but I am behind hemp? How did this happen?

Kelly Rippel:
Well, first of all, I thank you so much for having me. And the story goes back to in the early nineties, when I was going through middle school and we had dare class and I would come home from dare class, I asked my parents-

Matt Baum:
Oh, yeah. I remember dare. I never used drugs again. It totally worked. I never touched them.

Kelly Rippel:
Flawless, flawless. I came home and I asked my parents, “What do you know about this plant, marijuana that we keep hearing about?” And my dad said, “Well, as a matter of fact, I was involved in some research at Kansas State University in the 1970s,” which is America’s first land grant university. And he said, “One of the things we studied was the best ways to kill,” what they thought was, “marijuana.” Come to find out, it was actually hemp.

Matt Baum:
I was reading about this. And when I found you, I found this on Medium, you had written about this. So Kansas had a full on hemp extermination program, basically where they were like … Who founded this? Was it the farmers? Was it the government and who carried out the mass extermination?

Kelly Rippel:
Unfortunately, the government was involved, of course, because at that time this was the same era that the Controlled Substance Act came out. But that was in 1970, of course, but these studies were conducted in the late sixties, early seventies. So it was happening all at the same time. And what I found out in 2017 when I actually uncovered those full text documents at K State, which are not open access information, those studies were funded by Eli Lilly, which is a global pharmaceutical conglomerate.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. That’s a name that pops up a lot when we start talking about this history.

Kelly Rippel:
Yes. And as many people know, they formulated and sold cannabis derived medical products in the early 1900 in the US, so they knew benefits. They knew that there were really productive components of the cannabis plant in general, and they did what they could to eliminate that competition. And ultimately, it was really interesting that these studies both … they studied the cannabinoid profiles and how they fluctuate in Kansas over time, they studied the germination rate and the growth cycles over time, and then-

Matt Baum:
This is pretty groundbreaking stuff. This was stuff that hadn’t been done.

Kelly Rippel:
It was early studies. Raphael Meshulum had not identified THC and synthesized cannabinoids just a few years prior. So it really was groundbreaking. But my father was a volunteer student and he was earning his biology degree and he had farming backgrounds and they strapped canisters of 24D to their backs and walked farmers plots. And they tried burning. They tried infesting it. They tried insecticides, pesticides, all these different types of chemicals and the things they found out was it comes back.

Matt Baum:
Yeah, it’s a weed. You can’t kill it. So this pharmaceutical company comes to the state of Kansas under the guise of, “We need to eliminate this horrible menace of a plant marijuana. It’s a nightmare. It ruins lives. It kills everyone. We need you, agriculture college, to come up with an effective way to kill it,” and they stuck backpacks on students and sent them out into the fields?

Kelly Rippel:
Yeah. And of course, now we know that the 24D was phased out. I think it is still somewhat in use, but it has been tied to a lot of issues, health concerns.

Matt Baum:
This seems so amazingly irresponsible

Kelly Rippel:
Very much though.

Matt Baum:
You think about things like solidimide, which was happening around the same time. So people were aware that there are dangerous chemicals involved here. Was it the state that decided to do this, or the college just went along with it because it was a grant and they were like, “Sure, let’s do this study”?

Kelly Rippel:
There was a grant involved with it. And yes, it was from Eli Lilly and company and Allanco manufacturing. Those companies actually still fund research at K State. And they do likely elsewhere as well. And that was one of the things that I realized when I discovered this information is that this likely is not an isolated incident.

Matt Baum:
Oh, I’m sure.

Kelly Rippel:
There needs to be a concerted effort in trying to identify within each university and archives if these types of studies happened in other States, because if they did, that tells a lot bigger story than what we really know, and-

Matt Baum:
That’s conspiracy at that point, basically. Full-on conspiracy.

Kelly Rippel:
The other part of this is these studies were overseen by the Marijuana Control Commission, which was under the guise of Governor Docking at that time in Kansas. And so law enforcement was involved and there’s just a lot of conflicts of interest involved with these studies that wouldn’t fly today.

Matt Baum:
It’s funny how that always pops up is that there’s always an odd conflict of interest. But I agree with you. I find it very hard to believe that there weren’t similar studies like this that happened at Nebraska, Missouri, North Dakota State, any of these ag colleges. I bet they were all over the Midwest because that’s where the stuff was grown.

Kelly Rippel:
Right. And it was very interesting. And like you said, this was some groundbreaking research they did because they mapped where it originated in the Northeastern corner, along the Missouri river. And it spread throughout the state. It was really some in depth and comprehensive data that they collected, and Kansas is known for very comprehensive data, just in general. So it’s pretty fascinating to see this information

From ‘Hemp For Victory’ to ‘invasive species’

Matt Baum:
Let’s go back before they started the mass extermination, why Kansas? Was Kansas hemp hotbed, or we all basically I’ve come to think of Kentucky as the original hemp producer in the United States. But it sounds like before this, Kansas was producing quite a bit of hemp.

Kelly Rippel:
We were. Of course, we had the Hemp for Victory movement and Kansas farmers were encouraged and paid to grow hemp for the war movement during World War II. Prior to that, though, there is a lot of theory, and I’m sure we will with scientific advancements and genomic testing, that we will be able to identify that cannabis was indigenous to Kansas. We didn’t introduce it here.

Matt Baum:
That’s another thing I wanted to ask you about. A lot of these reports, they called it an “invasive species” and tried to say it came from Asia, or it came from South America, but there are … I don’t know about hardcore records, but there’s definitely records that sound like when colonists came here, Native Americans were already growing hemp. It was here.

Kelly Rippel:
Exactly. And they were in South America and in Central America and what is now Mexico. Though, the indigenous peoples there, they were utilizing cannabis for a myriad of purposes and reasons and benefits. And yes, my understanding is when the Spanish came and “settled,” they introduced hemp, the fibrous variety, because they needed indigenous peoples to grow fibrous varieties for sales and [inaudible 00:12:46] so they can then ship goods back to Europe and other countries

Matt Baum:
With the whole idea of labeling him as invasive, is that just come down to more of the racist rhetoric that was behind the Marijuana Control Act and stuff, or?

Kelly Rippel:
That’s part of it. My understanding is that yes, anti-immigration and ultimately racism and discrimination, bigotry, those were of course, very strong components of prohibiting cannabis in general. However, as we also know, it’s the corporate exclusivity that really forced the laws to change because we had, of course, William Randolph Hearst, Harry Anslinger, it was the combination of these multi factors that prohibited it-

Matt Baum:
The paper guys, the cotton guys and the pharmaceutical guys.

Kelly Rippel:
Exactly.

Matt Baum:
So we mentioned Lily, and you said Lilly, who had already been dealing in hemp derived and cannabis derived pharmaceuticals when this takes place and they’re killing this all off, they have their own private hemp fields where they’re still growing this? Where they’re still working this?

Kelly Rippel:
That I don’t know.

Matt Baum:
Because that runs really deep at that point. That’s where we could be like, “Okay, these guys are criminals, goddammit!”

Kelly Rippel:
Yeah. There’s just a lot of unanswered questions, and that’s why I’ve been so fascinated with trying to understand where we came from and why we’re in the situation we are, because it didn’t just happen. There were multiple concerted efforts to be able to limit what we know as cannabis.

Matt Baum:
I was going to say, it did just happen because one day somebody went, “Hey, there’s more money in making this just happen than letting it go on.” You know what I mean? And the more you dig, it shouldn’t be shocking that money and government and major corporations are all tied very close together. It’s just so crazy when we look back at the history of this, and it happened in every state, literally every state, it’s easy to say, “Well, it hit this state the hardest because they were growing the most or whatever,” but even Nebraska had a history of this that I didn’t know about and digging into it blows my mind.

Kelly Rippel:
Absolutely. Kansas also has a pretty unique history regarding prohibition, just in general. We’re the state of Kerry Nation and we’re also the free state. There’s just a lot of intersecting motives and intents that happened in Kansas.

Kansas and the War on Drugs

Matt Baum:
For a long time, and when I say a long time, I mean like 30 or 40 years, Kansas is completely prohibitive on this, wants nothing to do with it. And at that same time, I remember there was a book that came out, I want to say, late nineties, probably late nineties, early 2000s, “What is the Deal with Kansas?” And it was all about how puritanical and conservative Kansas had become, going from a relatively liberal democratic state to just swinging as far right as possible. And you had massive, crazy prosecutions for marijuana. People thrown in prison, like the same that they would be for crack cocaine and whatnot. And now you guys, somehow Kansas has a legalized marijuana for a medical marijuana law, and Nebraska does not. What happened? I don’t understand.

Kelly Rippel:
So actually, Kansas is one of the final four to not legalize. And Nebraska is on the books to vote. And so they’re actually a little bit further ahead than we are right now.

Matt Baum:
We do have a vote coming. We’ll see.

Kelly Rippel:
Yeah, I hope that it happens in Nebraska. They need it there, just like they do anywhere else. But the bottom line is with being surrounded a hundred percent, the lawmakers in Kansas are going to be up against a lot of pressure, and they already have been. But to know that we are literally just exporting goods and money, revenue, all of this, it will have to stop eventually. And we can’t continue down that path.

Matt Baum:
It seems very similar to a lot of the arguments that people had about gambling in States where the neighboring state would have casinos, and we don’t, we’re just losing all that money, but we’re talking about the bread basket of America here and now farmers can’t make the money they used to on wheat, on soy, on corn, on any of this stuff. But hemp and marijuana, especially all of a sudden farmers are seeing this and going, “Why aren’t we doing something with this?” There’s still a lot of ideas about it’s a drug and it’s bad, and there’s old ideas based on that, but I think there’s also more clarity now, how has Kansas changed? How have you seen it change in your lifetime? Because you grew up around the same time I did where we went through dare and now Kansas is looking at legalizing hemp for industrial usage and whatnot. Was this gradual? Have you guys been fighting the whole time? How did this change?

Kelly Rippel:
That’s a great question. There has been a coalition in Kansas working over 10 years now on getting medicinal cannabis legalized. And it was in that movement that I identified that I really needed to branch out and say, “Look, we need industrial hemp here.” Not more than anything, but for an ag based state like Kansas … Kansas is ranked number three in the nation in regards to farmable acreage per capita. Our economy is driven by agriculture. And so you’re right when you’ve got markets that are tanking and have continuously gone down and farmers at the same time are paying more for their inputs for their acreage, it’s not a good combination.

Kelly Rippel:
And farmers have been suffering I think for quite a while, for several years. Of course, we had a horrible drought in 2012. And from that, there’s been a big effort of conservation and saving water and saving the aquifer and getting into regen ag and soil health and all of this. So there’ve been some really positive steps made to help mitigate a lot of the damage that’s been done to monoculture ultimately. I’ve spoken to farmers out in Western Kansas that said we should have never introduced corn to Kansas because it’s so water intensive.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. Same in Nebraska. We became the corn husker state. And now we have a desert in our panhandle because of it. It’s crazy.

Kelly Rippel:
It is and the thing about it is the majority of that corn, if not all of it, at least grown in Kansas, isn’t going to feed people. It’s going to animal feed, and ethanol, which we know is a very expensive process for biofuel. It has been interesting to be able to go around the state. One of the really fortunate opportunities I had early on with Kansas for hemp was we went around the state and we sat in the room with farmers. We answered their questions and heard their concerns about what this might mean to reintroduced another crop. And we took that information back. I provided testimony in the state house and I was working with lobbyists and coalitions for industrial hemp, and we got it passed. Once you have the crucial conversations and you are able to answer people’s concerns legitimately, they see the different side of things. And I think that’s been the paradigm shift over time.

(Re)legalizing hemp in Kansas

Matt Baum:
Did the history help at all? Were you in those conversations? Did you go back and say, “Hey, look, we were growing this not long ago.” I’m not talking about even cowboy and Indian years, we’re talking about 50, 60 years ago.

Kelly Rippel:
Yes. Oh, absolutely. We pulled out all the stops. And I think that’s how we got it done. And of course, power in numbers. That’s how it happened. That’s how you influence especially lawmakers. And once they see the economic side of things, especially, but at the same time, we’ve got these a handful of representatives from law enforcement agencies, for example. We know that their job is crucial. They are there protecting our cities and serving our communities. And we feel like this is a perfect opportunity for them to help rebuild their constituency. But at the same time, we’ve seen some lobbyists that are representing agencies that don’t really have a full understanding of perhaps how their forces consider cannabis or hemp for that matter.

Matt Baum:
That is way more polite than I would have put it by the way, but I totally hear you.

Kelly Rippel:
We’re still hearing testimonies such as, “Well, if Kansas allows medical cannabis, it’s going to make the state fall into mediocrity.” And it’s just these types of arguments don’t hold weight. They just don’t.

Matt Baum:
You remember when Elvis created rock and roll, then we just became a nation of sodomites and monsters. It’s this old ridiculous thinking where you don’t understand it’s already here. It is more pervasive now, and you are aiding a black market. That’s all you are doing with these ridiculous arguments. And obviously this is a show about hemp, but I feel like it is impossible to talk about hemp without talking about marijuana or cannabis as well. And one of the biggest things that’s holding Nebraska back right now from industrial hemp is our governor thinks marijuana is right up there with heroin. You smoked marijuana and then you’re on PCP two days later, and then you’re getting shot 16 times while you are running at the cops. And it’s just that insane thinking.

Matt Baum:
You had mentioned how we’ve got it on the ballot that we have a governor we voted to get rid of the death penalty. And our governor said, “No,” and put it back in action. The people voted. So what happens when we vote and say, “Yes, we want medical marijuana use in Nebraska.” He can say, “No. Veto. Sorry, won’t do it.” And the farmers want this. That’s what’s blowing my mind, is that the farmers need help. And the state is not helping them, but they continue to vote for people that will hurt their own cause for reasons like you said, fear the state will fall into mediocrity. What does that even mean?

Matt Baum:
I would Demand a definition of that. Mediocrity? We’re Kansas. There were already a fly over state for most people. Give me a break. You were part of putting together this idea of legalizing medical marijuana in Kansas as well, right?

Kelly Rippel:
I have been helping the movement here and I now advise the Kansas Cannabis Business Association as well. I was also fortunate to, to help coauthor a bill that was introduced last year.

Matt Baum:
I saw that.

Kelly Rippel:
Unfortunately there have been a lot of political games that people are playing and that’s why nothing happened last year, but we’ve got a pretty strong momentum going into this next session. So we’re hoping that we’re going to get it done in 2021.

Matt Baum:
That’s excellent. And what’s the temperature feel like? It sounds like the populace is behind this and it sounds like Kansas is no longer the completely right wing conservative state that it used to be. In fact, from what I’ve heard, Kansas in actually considered in play this year and maybe it’s just because the current administration has been so awful. I don’t know. The political landscape, has it gotten easier to navigate? Are you dealing with just a few bumps in the road at this point?

Kelly Rippel:
Yeah. It’s definitely an interesting environment-

Matt Baum:
A sigh like that is never good by the way. It’s never followed by a happy story.

Kelly Rippel:
I will say that we’re seeing some major changes, and it’s happening on all levels of state government, of nonprofit organizations, of people who are operating in the state, as well as businesses wanting to come to Kansas. I’ve spoken with a couple of different big players that would love to come here. And if things were a little bit different policy wise, they may make the move. And yeah, we do have some, I guess folks, we’ll say ultra conservative people. And what we’ve seen from the federal side is there’s a lot of divisiveness just in general in politics right now.

Kelly Rippel:
And Kansas is not immune to that. No state is immune to that, but there is this sort of comradery that I’ve seen lawmakers follow through with because we have to work together to make things happen. That’s the way things work. And I actually have also a unique perspective about the state house, because having grown up into Topeka, I spent a lot of my formative years in the state house because my mother was the executive assistant to four different Senate presidents. And so I understand, and also very much appreciate the work that policy makers and grassroots advocate movements do. And-

Matt Baum:
You didn’t have a chance. This started for you at a very young age. And it was all over like, “Oh, I guess I’m a freedom fighter. Here we go.”

Kelly Rippel:
It’s in my blood.

Matt Baum:
There you go. If mom and dad were rodeo clowns, you’d be poking out of a barrel right now.

Matt Baum:
So what’s the-

Kelly Rippel:
No, it’s …

Matt Baum:
I’m sorry. Go ahead. Please finish.

Kelly Rippel:
No, I was just going to say this coming election is going to be very, very interesting because I think we are going to see some seats flipped, both in the house and the Senate-

Matt Baum:
Without a doubt.

Changing attitudes & laws about cannabis

Kelly Rippel:
Traditionally, our Kansas legislature has been very conservative, but it has gone back and forth throughout the years. And it also is reflective of the governorship and the administration. But yeah, we’re seeing some great movement. And I will also say that there was a political poll that just came out recently and there is some strong candidates that are coming into the folds here in November. And we’re also seeing a shift with people who are running for reelection because they know … There was a study done in 2019, over 76% of Kansans believe that medical cannabis should be legalized. There’s no party. This isn’t black, this isn’t red or blue. It’s bi-partisan.

Matt Baum:
That’s more than three quarters of the state. Now, which side of that argument should you be on if you want to get elected? I can’t do that math, but it seems like the big number is the good one, right? This is the stuff that blows my mind. And as far as industrial hemp goes, you guys are producing now. Kansas is an industrial hemp state.

Kelly Rippel:
This is true. The bill was passed in 2018. 2019 was the first year that we were able to cultivate, of course, under the guise of the Kansas Department of Ag and the research program, which I was appointed to. And I sat on the Industrial Hemp Research Advisory Board under the Department of Ag. I was appointed by Secretary McClaskey and then I was reappointed by Secretary Mike Beam. And that experience was so influential to me because I got to see how that program worked. And I was part of the group that got to review all the licenses and we approved the licenses. I will say that 2020, we did decrease in licenses. And I think every state did for multiple reasons. But the Kansas Department of Ag did submit a commercial hemp program to USDA. It was approved. And now we’re just in this holding pattern until the legislature enacts it. And at that point, we will venture down the path of a commercial program.

Matt Baum:
That’s excellent. And hopefully by then, there’s going to be more companies that are making fabrics, that are making plastic polymers, that are making hempcrete and whatnot, because there is so much money here. And again, like we said earlier, it’s a weed. It grows really easily. It doesn’t need the water. It doesn’t need as many of the chemical compounds that keep pests away and whatnot. This is a win-win. And I hope Kansas figures it out. I hope Nebraska does too. Right now, the Midwest, we’re supposed to be doing this. This is what we’re supposed to be doing. And I’m glad that we have freedom fighters like you out there. But again, it sounds like you’ve had no choice. It sounds like you were born into this cult.

Kelly Rippel:
Well, I appreciate that. And it’s been an expansion of course, and I’m so thrilled to be involved with this movement in multiple ways. And the fact that we have groups now such as the Midwest Hemp Council and Ministry of Hemp and all of these … Oregon, the US Hemp Roundtable. And I now sit on the advisory board of the Hemp Economic Development Group, which was just formed based out of Chicago. And we’re going to see some pretty exciting things happen within the next few months and years.

Matt Baum:
That’s awesome. How many groups you’re on now? I think you’ve mentioned 20 so far. You have free time, right? You stop every once in a while.

Kelly Rippel:
I try. Yeah, it’s a handful.

Matt Baum:
Kelly, thanks again for joining me, man. This was fantastic. And I find it really interesting just also coming from a fly over ag state, these battles being fought, how different it is here than it is in States like, even Kentucky or Oregon or California. Mind you, they’re all bogged down in their own government battles right now, but it seems like once we get this started, you will not be able to ignore the benefits and those voices that held everyone back, they are going to be on the wrong side of history here. And I hope people remember that.

Kelly Rippel:
I agree. And Kansas was the number one producer of hemp bushels per acre. And that was in 1865, I believe.

Matt Baum:
That’s a little while ago.

Kelly Rippel:
It was a while ago and our time is coming. It’s inevitable.

Matt Baum:
Yeah. I totally agree.

Matt Baum:
Huge. Thanks to Kelly for coming on the show. I love talking to people like that with so much passion and a serious mind for how to get this stuff done too. It’s amazing how many different groups this guy is working with. And of course I’ll have links to all of those in the show notes for this episode.

Final thoughts from Matt

Matt Baum:
Time to wrap things up on this episode, but there is still so much Ministry of Hemp stuff out there to keep you busy in the meantime. Head over to ministryofhemp.com and check out a couple of great articles we’ve got up right now. One is an update to our Vaping CBD Oil 101 article, which is fantastic because as you heard, if you paid attention to the show or read the news, for a while there, there was some scares with vaping cannabis. Again, this had nothing to do with CBD, but we still wanted to make sure here at the Ministry of Hemp, we check everything out and we’ve updated the article with some great information. Also, if you’re having trouble sleeping, we’ve got a really good review posted about Helios natural sleep drops. Check that one out too. I know I have had a lot of success with CBD and sleep recently. I’m a very light sleeper, and I find that if I dose before I go to bed, I have a real good night’s sleep.

Matt Baum:
Be sure to follow us on all of our social media /ministryofhemp @ministryofhemp. We’re always posting cool stuff. We’re always posting links to our new articles. And if you want to help us in finding new articles and writing new stuff, you can become a Ministry of Hemp insider over at Patreon. That’s Patreon/MinistryofHemp. It’ll get you access to early articles, Patreon exclusive articles, Patreon, exclusive podcast extras, like I’ve got a video of the Harney Brothers who I interviewed on our last episode, planting their hemp. And it’s actually a pretty funny video. It’s not quite as professional as a lot of the hemp farmers that I’ve talked to, but I think it’s really cool to see that you can just go out there, get your hands dirty and plant this stuff.

Matt Baum:
At the Ministry of Hemp, we believe that an accessible world is a better world for everybody, so we have a full written transcript of this episode in the show notes as well. Next time on the show, we are going to be talking about new hemp children’s book. You heard that right. It’s a children’s book about hemp. And I can’t wait to tell you all about it. Be sure to tune in.

Matt Baum:
But for now, I got to get out of here. And I like to end the show the same way every time 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 Kansas Hemp Stories: Kansas Is Becoming A Hemp Powerhouse (Again) appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

In this episode of the Ministry of Hemp podcast, our host Matt recaps 2019’s year-in-hemp news and then sits down for a conversation with CEO and founder of Hempitecture, Mattie Mead. The two discuss Mattie’s history, his belief in renewable construction and hempcrete’s present and future.

Show notes

Early in the podcast, Matt mentions these key takeaways from the 2019 Hemp Industry Daily Forum.

We’ve also written quite a bit before about hempcrete, including how hempcrete is used in Australia, the benefits of hempcrete homes and even a unique hempcrete doghouse. In the video above, we profiled the Highland Hemp House, a unique retrotfit of a 1970s home with hempcrete.

Over at Hemp Magazine, our Editor Kit wrote about the issues blocking hempcrete’s acceptance in the U.S., including his interview with Mattie Mead. We also mentioned Just BioFiber, the awesome Canadian company making hemp-based building blocks for life-sized buildings.

Sponsored by LifePatent

Thanks to our friends at LifePatent, one of our Top CBD Brands, for sponsoring this episode of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. Check out their site now to try free samples of their great sleep capsules.

Send us your feedback!

We want to hear from you too. Send us your questions and you might hear them answered on future shows like this one! Send us your written questions to us on Twitter, Facebook, email 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.

Hempcrete And The Future of Sustainable Construction: Complete episode transcript

Below you’ll find the complete written transcript for this episode:

Matt Baum: The Ministry of Hemp Podcast is brought to you by Life Patent, purveyors of high-quality CBD products that just happen to be one of our favorite brands, too. They care very deeply about their customers because when it comes down to it, Life Patent understands their customers are people seeking relief. You can learn more about the entire line of CBD-related products at lifepatent.com.

Matt Baum: Welcome to Episode 24 of the Ministry of Hemp Podcast. My name is Matt Baum, and I am your host. Folks, this is the final show of 2019. Today on the show, we are going to continue our theme of hemp as an alternative. Last time you might remember I spoke to Morris Beegle from We Need a Better Alternative about hemp woods and hemp plastics.

Matt Baum: Today we’re going to talk with Mattie Mead from Hempitecture. They are working with a very exciting concrete alternative called, you guessed it, hempcrete. We’ll get into all that in just a minute. But, first, with this being the final show of the year and, oh, I thought it might be a good time to take a look at hemp, a year in review 2019.

2019: The year in hemp

Matt Baum: You probably heard me talk about it plenty of times on this show, but as I’m sure you know, 2018 we saw the US farm bill that essentially legalized the growing of hemp in the United States. It made 2019 a very exciting year for hemp. 2019 marked the first American legal harvests of hemp in the US, and with that came a spike in interest in the plant itself, not just for CBD but like we’ve been talking about, alternatives in construction, alternatives in fabric, alternatives in paper.

Matt Baum: We saw the hemp market hit a billion dollars. We saw CEOs of hemp companies popping up on Forbes 30 Under 30 list that they put out every year. There’s been a lot of new studies released showing that CBD really is helping people with things like pain and anxiety and homeostasis, which we are finding out is more important than ever.

Matt Baum: With that, we’ve seen the rise of thousands of new CBD-based shops opened by small business owners, who are doing the hard work and making sure that they’re stocking good products that come from good hemp farmers. We saw famous sports athletes speaking up and saying they want to make CBD part of their recovery regimen. With that, a CBD sponsorship for a major sports women’s soccer championship game that was on television.

Matt Baum: All in all, it was a great year for hemp, but there are still some problems too, though. We saw Washington bringing the DEA in to work with hemp legislation. We’ve got some fights there that will be fought. But 2020 is looking pretty bright, too. The Hemp Industry Daily, which is a great website if you haven’t checked it out, dropped an article on December 11th about the five business takeaways from the 2019 Hemp Industry Daily forum, where they brought in several huge names in the hemp business, and they had a lot of very positive things to say for the market going forward in 2020.

Matt Baum: Obviously, there is a huge CBD bubble right now, and if it is going to continue to grow, one of the conclusions that they came to is the price is going to have to come down, making it more available to everyone. That is going to happen now that we’re seeing more and in production legally in the States.

Matt Baum: The fiber market for hemp is showing real potential as well. As textile producers learn more about how hemp can be incorporated into materials they are already working with, that market is going to explode. It looks like some predictions are saying the market next year could grow by as much as $25 million to $50 million.

Matt Baum: Basically, there is no end in sight for the hemp marketplace, but we need to make sure that we are still getting the right messages out there, that we are still doing this the right way, and we are educating not just the public but the business sector that is going to go into this, because they are the ones that are going to lobby Washington to let them do this the right way.

Matt Baum: Hemp has made a lot of progress in 2019, more probably than in the last 50 years, here in the States anyway. But it’s up to us to make 2020 an even better year. So keep preaching the word, get out there, and express your interest for hemp products. Look for people that are doing it the right way. You can always do that at ministryofhemp.com. Now let’s get to my interview with Mattie Mead of Hempitecture.

Introducing Mattie Mead of Hempitecture

Matt Baum: Now, Mattie, one of the things that you guys are famous for is hempcrete. We’ll get into that, but first I want to know how does someone like you find their way to this company working with hemp in an industrial sense. Where’d you come from? What’s your origin story?

Mattie Mead: That’s a great question, and I love telling that story because it’s rooted back to my time as an architecture student. In 2012, 2013, I was finishing my architectural studies degree at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, which is a liberal arts college in upstate New York, about 2,500 students. So pretty small, but the cool thing about going to a small school like that, especially with a liberal arts focus, is you get to learn a lot of different subjects and really get a diverse education.

Mattie Mead: When I went to college, I was not initially intending to go to school for architecture, but my whole life, I had been a creative. Kindergarten onward, I was very much so interested in the arts. My first semester of college, I didn’t have any art-related courses, and this was after four years of high school where I was in the advanced placement art program and spent a lot of my time working in different mediums.

Mattie Mead: So my first semester of college, I didn’t have any art courses. I was like, “Wow! Something is really missing for me here,” and I became interested in the architecture program there. I viewed architecture as a practical application of art. I have the utmost respect for artists-

Matt Baum: Absolutely, yeah.

Mattie Mead: … but I didn’t see myself as being a career artist trying to make it that way. Architecture just seemed like something that was an extension of my creative desires. So I enrolled in this architecture program, and it surely was life-changing for me. I had really incredible professors and teachers around me.

Mattie Mead: But really where the Hempitecture story begins is while I was studying architecture, I got on a fast track with that program, which allowed me to diversify and expand my education. I undertook a minor in environmental sciences. It’d been a split education where it’s like I was spending part of my time in environmental sciences, part of my time in architecture.

Matt Baum: Sure.

Mattie Mead: And I had this light bulb moment where I was thinking about we consider the natural world. It’s its own entity. Then in the world of architecture, we consider the built environment separately. It’s not that common or often that we really think about the relationship between the built environment and the natural world. We just impose the built environment on the natural world and hope it meets our needs. To me-

Matt Baum: I suppose that’s true. You can look at all the glass and steel everywhere, yeah. We just drop buildings where they need to go, not where they should go, right?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, exactly. There was one specific statistic that I mean I still share to this day, and that statistic was that buildings and their operations are responsible for 40% of our domestic carbon footprint and approximately 40% of our domestic energy consumption.

Matt Baum: That is massive.

Mattie Mead: If we don’t change the way we design and build, we’re not going to do anything, or we’ll do very little about, I’m sure, the problems with sustainability in our built environment.

Matt Baum: That’s 40%. That is a huge chunk, too. We’re not talking like a little sliver. That’s massive.

Mattie Mead: Yeah, it actually makes up more of the domestic energy share than the transportation industry-

Matt Baum: God.

Mattie Mead: … which is fascinating when you think about all the planes, trains, cars on the road. The CO2 footprint from those is less than the operation of our built environment, the CO2 footprint that that creates.

Discovering hempcrete & earth architecture

Matt Baum: So getting into this pushed you into this ecological mindset basically, when you started to discover these things?

Mattie Mead: Absolutely. It pushed me into this ecological mindset. My senior year, I had a little bit of, I guess, flexibility in how I was able to continue my senior year because I’ve taken care of a lot of my undergraduate requirements. So I decided to do a thesis study. That thesis study I titled The Contemporary Relevance of Earth Architecture.

Mattie Mead: So now this time I’d never even heard of hempcrete. I had not even a slight bit of awareness of it. But actually what was fascinating to me was vernacular archetypes, so wattle and daub, cob, rammed earth, straw-bale, which are used in various different parts of the world.

Matt Baum: Okay, real quick. I don’t know what any of that is. What are we talking about there?

Mattie Mead: They’re all different styles, natural building techniques.

Matt Baum: Okay, okay.

Mattie Mead: So rammed earth is essentially using a specific kind of clay-based soil and compacting it with great pressure, and forming walls out of earth.

Matt Baum: Okay, sure.

Mattie Mead: If you think of New Mexico, kind of southwestern-

Matt Baum: Like adobe buildings and whatnot.

Mattie Mead: Totally, totally. It’s that kind of archetype. In my research, I learned about hemp lime, hempcrete being used in France, primarily at the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands. When I discovered that, it was this moment of like, oh my gosh, this is exciting to me and I want to pursue this and, perhaps most importantly, what a missed opportunity for the United States. At this time, I think they were [crosstalk 00:11:25].

Matt Baum: How long ago was this? I’m curious. How long ago was this when you first discovered it?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, so that was 2012 and 2013.

Matt Baum: Okay. How long have they been working-

Mattie Mead: I have to say-

Matt Baum: … with this stuff in Europe at that point?

Mattie Mead: Oh gosh, for over a decade at least.

Matt Baum: Really?

Mattie Mead: There is now evidence of hemp-based building materials going back thousands of years. There was a UNESCO world heritage site discovered, I want to say, in India that they excavated, they found hemp-based building materials used in a temple of sorts. There might be even a bigger history to the use of hemp and lime as a building material, or hemp in general as a building material. But what really got my gears turning was this modern day present use of hemp lime in these European countries.

Matt Baum: Sure. From there, that’s what gives you the push to start Hempitecture. Am I saying that right?

Mattie Mead: Yeah. It’s like hemp architecture, Hempitecture.

Matt Baum: Got you.

Mattie Mead: That was really the crux point of founding Hempitecture. I remember the day that I came up with that name. I was in the car with my entrepreneurial mentor, who actually was an alumnus of the same college that I went to. I was interning for him one summer, actually, my senior year interning for him. I said to him in the car, I said, “[KB 00:13:15], hear me out. Hemp architecture. Hempitecture,” and he goes, “Oh, that’s good. You need to write that down. Write that down.” Then that was-

Matt Baum: Did anybody ask you if you were insane? When you first started and told people like, “This is what I want to do. I want to go into building materials made of hemp,” did anyone say you’re crazy?

Mattie Mead: They said I was beyond crazy, to quote your word, “insane”, yeah. I mean early on, there was so much pushback. Also, I think it’s important to contextualize where I was. It’s interesting to consider that now. At the time, I was in upstate New York. Don’t get me wrong. I was born and raised on the east coast. I love the east coast, but probably less progressive than some other places in the United States. So I feel like perhaps had I been in Colorado, people would have been like, “Right on, man. Go for it.” But in New York, people were like, “You’re out of your mind. This is never going to happen. You’re talking about building homes from a substance that is on … It’s federally illegal. It’s on the Controlled Substances Act. You’re out of your mind.”

Matt Baum: Or at least importing materials that are going to be so expensive that the beginning of your cost starts way higher than someone that’s just going to go rip rocks out of the ground and crush them up, right?

Mattie Mead: Right, right. It was tough for me because I was so optimistic and so gung-ho on making this my reality. It wasn’t about me, it was about the potential impact that this venture could have from both a sustainability standpoint, but also from a societal benefit standpoint. Once I learned about the health benefits of it and how people whom are living in hemp-based homes feel better, they’re healthier, they’re exposed to less toxins, I really saw this as an idea that could have been an impetus for good.

Mattie Mead: The naysayers were … It was disappointing to me, but it never quite deterred me enough to totally step away. Although I will say there’s definitely some times that it was questionable whether or not I would try to move forward.

What is hempcrete?

Matt Baum: Sure. Let me ask you now that hemp is legal and we’re growing hemp in the United States, is it easier? Are people saying, “Oh man. That’s a great idea”? Are they singing a different tune to you now or are they still like, “Pfft. Good luck, kid”?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, I think it’s going to slow transition and revolution in how people conceptualize and think of industrial hemp. So my senior year of college, I was promoting this concept in business plan competition. I was going in front of venture capital judges actually promoting a product concept. It wasn’t like, “Hey, I want to go out there and build hemp buildings.” It was a material concept for creating an interlocking, insulating building block that can go together just like Legos …

Matt Baum: Yeah, hemp Legos, basically.

Mattie Mead: … which now [crosstalk 00:16:37] out there on the market. Early on, people were like, “You’re out of your mind. You’re crazy.” Then a few states are adopting industrial hemp regulations and then it started to become a little bit more normalized. Now you flash forward to today where the farm bill was passed 2018, and now in New York and the northeast is a region that’s actually leading the industrial hemp bioeconomy. I mean they’re doing a lot in [crosstalk 00:17:07].

Matt Baum: All of a sudden they’re paying attention now in the east, huh?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, yeah. And so, it’s funny to look back and see the same place that I was five, six years ago, kind of like saying, “No, it’s never going to happen,” is now, like, where it actually is happening, but there’s still so much further that we have to go for this to really become a United States-based industry. We’re really still just at the start, especially with the farm bill passing in 2018.

Matt Baum: So tell me about the hempcrete itself. Let’s talk about how do you make hempcrete? I mean obviously you’re not just pulling a plant out of the ground and grinding it up. I mean what goes into it? What part of the plant are we using? How do you guys do this?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, that’s a great question, Matt. So hempcrete is a biocomposite. That’s a fancy word for saying more than one natural-based thing that are combined together. We’re using the wooden core of the industrial hemp stalk, which that one core, you grow fiber variety industrial hemp.

Mattie Mead: There’s a lot of steps before you can get that wooden core that meet the needs of a building-grade product. It goes through a decortication process, which that concept there is important. Decortication is so essential to this industry as a whole because without decortication, you don’t have a way of separating different plant constituents into their valuable end uses.

Mattie Mead: With the plant itself, primarily what we’re concerned with, initially at least, was just the core. We want clean core, we want it free, about long fiber. I’d also like to explain the hemp stalk is this vertical mass that’s wearing a jacket. Before you can get into what’s inside the jacket, you have to take the jacket off. That process really requires specific machinery. But once that jacket’s taken off, you’re left with something that looks identical to wood chips. With wood chips-

Matt Baum: Okay. So we’re basically taking it apart and putting it back together at this point.

Mattie Mead: Yeah, you’re taking it apart, you’re getting your different parts that you need, in this case the core. Then that core is what is mixed with your binder. The binder is the other very crucial and critical element, and it’s often the less talked about part of the hempcrete biocomposite. It’s slightly less sexy than the hemp component of it-

Matt Baum: Fair enough.

Mattie Mead: … but it’s, in my opinion, just as important, if not even more important. Primarily, hempcrete is created-

Using the whole hemp plant (or not)

Matt Baum: Let me ask you before you go any further. Before you go any further, let me ask you, if I’m a farmer and I’m growing hemp … And this might be a silly question. If it is, I apologize. But I’m a farmer and I am growing hemp for CBD. I am going to sell the flower, basically, for CBD. Can I use that same plant to sell it to someone like you who’s going to use it to make hempcrete, but perhaps the stalks?

Mattie Mead: That is not a stupid question, and there are many bright minds that are working on that exact question right now, because that’s a huge problem with the CBD industry. What do you do with your leftover biomass that is a lot less valuable than the flowers themselves? When you look at a-

Matt Baum: If you can make it more valuable, farmers are going to grow more of it too, if we can say, “Well, hey, I’m not just selling the flower. I can also sell this pulp or the internal parts to the Hempitecture guys and they can make that.” Now you have a value-added crop, right?

Mattie Mead: Absolutely. Right there you’re getting at the heart of the goal of full spectrum utilization of the plant. You want to utilize all components of it. Nothing goes to waste.

Matt Baum: Cool.

Mattie Mead: But there’s a challenge with that, and that challenge is that fiber variety industrial hemp is grown with different agronomical practices than CBD hemp is grown. There are a lot of similarities, and this is putting it in layman’s terms and there are people who could do much better than I could at elaborating on the subtle nuances and differences. But, primarily, CBD is cultivated very similarly to cannabis. It’s very manicured. It’s got spacing that allows the plant to become more bushy. It often has more flowering tops than, say, a fiber variety wood that grows more similarly to other bast-style crops, flax, kenaf, jute.

Mattie Mead: And so, one of the problems is because of just some of the ways that CBD hemp is grown, it’s more difficult to process. But I’m hopeful, and I know that there are people out there and hopefully people that are listening to this that are working to tackle that issue of how do we divert this waste from the CBD industry and turn into something valuable. I’m hopeful that we’ll start seeing that coming online very, very soon.

Matt Baum: But the plant that you’re looking for is basically more of a beefy, fibrous plant that is grown for that fiber.

Mattie Mead: Correct. We could really get into the weeds, no pun intended, about-

Matt Baum: No, we don’t want to get too scientific here. I mean I’m not a scientist, so we want people to enjoy this show.

Mattie Mead: Yeah, yeah. There’s dual-crop varieties which make you can get a little bit of CBD, you can get food, you can get fiber, you can get hurd. But, primarily, from what I’ve seen, a lot of the agronomical practices surrounding industrial hemp are, “Hey, we’re growing this for CBD,” or, “Hey, we’re growing this for fiber.” It’s very specifically purposed.

Building with hempcrete

Matt Baum: So after you guys get the fiber, it’s decorticated. You take the jacket off, as you said, and you got those wood chips. Then what happens to it?

Mattie Mead: So we send those to a project site, at the project site where the building is already structurally framed out because hempcrete is a non-load-bearing material. Hempcrete is a bit of a misnomer to a certain extent, just in that people think it’s a concrete replacement. It is not. But rather it’s-

Matt Baum: That was my next question, actually.

Mattie Mead: Yeah. There’s a bit of a movement right now that I really respect and appreciate, of people starting to label hempcrete as hemp lime. Hey, call what it is because hempcrete is, as I said before, a biocomposite derived from hemp core and lime. You have it on site there. You have your building framed out. You need to combine it with the binder before it can really do anything, binder and water. The binder is like the magic glue that sets off this reaction. Why limestone? Limestone, calcium carbonate, a calcification reaction occurs when you mix limestone with water.

Matt Baum: That’s the same as concrete, basically, right?

Mattie Mead: It’s a little different than concrete in the sense that the reaction, the calcification reaction, is actually spurred on by pretty available carbon dioxide. This is where the really exciting sustainability impacts come in with hempcrete. Well, there’s numerous sustainability impacts.

Mattie Mead: But the material itself, carbon dioxide is pretty available in the atmosphere, within the calcification process, returning to a solid-state calcium carbonate with the hemp core embedded within this binding matrix. Essentially, if you can imagine, it’s like taking a white powder, mix it with water, and you add in the hemp core. That is the essence of hempcrete.

Matt Baum: Okay. All right. I see it working now. So we’ve got it there and it can be poured. From what I understand, there’s three different ways. You can pour it in a form or you can make it into bricks. Then you can also spray it like an insulation.

Mattie Mead: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. You nailed it there. The first style we call cast in place. That’s tamping it into form boards. Cast in place has … It’s truly an artisanal, beautiful approach, however, very labor-intensive.

Matt Baum: Right.

Mattie Mead: The second approach that you named there, blocks, blocks are great. They’re a nominal building material. Most people know how to work with [TNU 00:26:47] or other styles of block. There are some challenges, though, with blocks. How does the block integrate into a structural frame? If you’re making blocks, it’s not that likely that you’ll be making blocks on site, just because if you’re making them on site, why wouldn’t you just take the hempcrete and put it in form boards? And you’re subject to environmental conditions, the weather, temperature, humidity, so on and so forth. Then the third approach-

Matt Baum: Blocks would be something perhaps they would order and say, “We need this side blocks,” and they come in. Then you just throw them together, basically, Lego-style, right?

Mattie Mead: Yeah. There are a few companies out there, Just BioFiber in Canada, that is making an interlocking building block, really similar to the design concept that I had for interlocking building blocks when I was an undergraduate student in 2012. We are now making small batch order of blocks within our new space that we’re calling the Hempitecture Innovation Lab. We now have a brick and mortar space where we’re doing experimentation, innovating new products, and creating small block quarters for specific projects in mind.

Mattie Mead: For instance, if you had a tiny house you wanted to build and you said, “Hey, I want to build a 400-square foot house. How many blocks will we need?” well, we can make those in our new lab now and send them out after they’re cured, after being climate-controlled.

Mattie Mead: But the third option that you talked about there is really exciting and it’s something that’s new, or at least it’s new in the United States, and that is the spray-applied method. Spray-applied is very different than that cast in place artisanal approach. It’s much more, in my opinion, in line with how we build conventionally here in the United States. Oftentimes, insulation products, dense-packed cellulose or spray pump, it’s sprayed into the wall cavity.

Matt Baum: Right. They cut a hole and they squirt it in there, more or less.

Mattie Mead: Pretty much. Speaking simply, it’s similar to that. You could have a house sprayed out pretty conventionally. You have to make some substitutions to make hempcrete work. But now we’re able to spray-apply hempcrete. We can cut off 50% of the installation time from a cast in place approach with our system and that we’re distributing here in the United States called the Ereasy, which was invented in France.

Mattie Mead: And so, we’re now using that system on a lot of projects. We’re looking to get that system in the hands of more American builders. Shot out to [Amerishonver 00:29:50], a company from Pennsylvania, who is soon to be new owner of this.

Mattie Mead: We’re excited about this because this really democratizes the ability to effectively install hempcrete. What that does is it brings the cost down. It takes it less out of this sort of like artisanal, cast in place world, and democratizes it with something that more people can use. Ultimately, our goal is to [crosstalk 00:30:20].

Matt Baum: Yeah. If you can pick up a hose and you can turn on the machine, you can spray it, right?

Mattie Mead: Yeah. I mean I wish it was exactly that easy, but there’s like [crosstalk 00:30:30].

Matt Baum: I might be reducing it, I apologize.

Mattie Mead: It’s like standing next to an airplane jet when this thing is on.

Matt Baum: Oh, wow!

Mattie Mead: It is a powerful, loud system. But that force there, and the system as a whole, allows you to install this material just so much more quickly than the cast in place. [crosstalk 00:30:58].

The future of building with hemp

Matt Baum: What is the benefit of that? Let me ask you because I know this is load-bearing. What is the benefit? Is this acting as insulation or is it forming the walls? What is it doing?

Mattie Mead: Yeah, hempcrete takes the place of multiple materials. Primarily, by function, it’s an insulation material that does so much more, because the material itself is able to regulate moisture, humidity. It’s a vapor-open material, which is very contrary to the building science that we popularly accept here in the United States, where we do this thing where we build buildings and we wrap them in plastic, and we wonder why there’s mold problems and moisture issues.

Mattie Mead: It takes the place of your insulation, but it’s a monolithic material, meaning it’s continuous. There’s no breaks in it. There’s no thermal bridging. It can bury your structural frame, which oftentimes structural frames are made out of wood. You’re burying your structural frame in a material that’s fire-proof. That’s another benefit of it. It’s completely fire-proof. Especially now as conversations become more sensitive regarding wildfire and resiliency and the risks that we’re now facing as a result of, perceivedly, climate change, hempcrete is the solution for that.

Matt Baum: That’s amazing. Can I ask, is load-bearing hempcrete in the future? Is that coming?

Mattie Mead: I would say yes. I think there have been successful attempts in load-bearing hempcrete in the past. However, my inclination is to say that when you bring hempcrete to load-bearing capacities, it often has a density that’s much different than conventional hempcrete, which, therefore, makes it act much less proficiently as an insulator than it would with a lighter, more airy mix. And so, you would be substituting that structural capacity for the capacity of the material being [crosstalk 00:33:20].

Matt Baum: Okay, okay. I see. Yes, it’s coming, but we’ve got to do some work first to make it not only efficient, but as efficient as the stuff we’re using now, basically.

Mattie Mead: Yes. Yes, exactly.

Matt Baum: I live in Omaha, Nebraska and I decide, you know what, I’m building a new house. I’m going to call the Hempitecture guys. Can I call you and say I want to use hempcrete in my house that I’m building next week, or am I going to run into a bunch of problems with the city and with building permits and whatnot?

Mattie Mead: That’s a really good question, Matt. I would say if you call me and you said you needed hempcrete next week, we might be able to help you out, but it might be tough. Generally, working hemp lime into your construction program requires it being configured from the onset of your project. It really does require a full design program, which means from day one or pretty early on of design development, the architect is considering the use of hempcrete.

Mattie Mead: I mean we’ve been doing this now for about six years and we’ve had conversations with thousands of people over the years. However, we built fewer than a dozen hempcrete projects. Where does that number disconnect? It’s that hempcrete, for some reason or another, depending on the project, it can be difficult to implement, to be honest.

Matt Baum: I’m sure. I’m sure.

Mattie Mead: It’s easy to work with, but it can be difficult to implement. And so, that’s why recently we’ve expanded our focus at Hempitecture to have another product line. We’re now offering a new product that we call HempWool, which is a fiber batt insulation replacement. If you said, “I’ve got a building project. I need it insulated next week,” we would tell you, “I think you’re a little late in the game for hempcrete, but here’s a product alternative that is still hemp-derived. It meets probably 60% to 75% of the benefits that hempcrete has.”

Matt Baum: That’s awesome. It’s the kind of thing where this can be implemented anywhere in the United States now. You’re not going to run into permit problems and whatnot.

Mattie Mead: No. No permit problems. It could be implemented anywhere in the United States. It could be implemented by any person who’s ever installed insulation before, which is a huge benefit because hempcrete is a bit of a trade knowledge, a bit of a craft to it. Whereas with HempWool, you could substitute, “Hey, I’ve decided I don’t want to live in a toxic box of spray foam. I want to live in [inaudible 00:36:05] nurture my health.” HempWool is the answer for you when you’ve already gone down a conventional design program.

Matt Baum: It sounds like the future of hempcrete, and correct me if I’m wrong, but hempcrete is the future. It’s great and it works really well. But the future of hempcrete is making it easier to use and easier to implement.

Mattie Mead: Very much so. That’s something that we’ve been working on from the start, is how do we make this more approachable, more accessible, diversifying our product line so that if hempcrete doesn’t work for you, how can you still incorporate healthy sustainable material into your home?

Mattie Mead: One thing that I would just throw out there is as a company, we’re really looking to cultivate a community of people across the United States and internationally that are like-minded and sharing the same goals that we have. And so, we’re always open for collaboration. If people ever have questions for us, they can feel free to reach out. We’re expanding our team so we can service more projects, so we can have more impact, because, at the end of the day, what this is about for us is cultivating that community and creating positive change in the world and impacting our environment in a positive way.

Matt Baum: Man, and we love to hear that stuff here at Ministry of Hemp. That’s exactly what we’re looking for and that’s why I’m talking you today. Mattie, thank you so much for your time, man. This was great.

Mattie Mead: Thanks for the opportunity to be on here, Matt. It’s much appreciated.

Final thoughts from our host

Matt Baum: Yeah. Thanks again to Mattie Mead for coming on the show and for a great interview. Of course, you’ll be able to find all about what they do over at Hempitecture in the show notes of this very episode.

Matt Baum: That about does it for Episode 24, the final episode of 2019. I want to thank everybody that supported the show all yearlong. We don’t have a show without you guys. The easiest way to support the Ministry of Hemp Podcast is to go to iTunes and submit a star rating or even a written review if you have a little bit of time. It doesn’t even have to be long. It really, really helps get us out in front of people that are searching for this information and spread the good word of hemp education.

Matt Baum: As always, you will find a full written transcript of this show to make it accessible for everybody, because at Ministry of Hemp, we believe that an accessible world is just a better world for everyone. If you’ve got some time off during your holiday break, be sure to jump over to ministryofhemp.com. Kit has a fantastic article about hemp and the FDA. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter so you can get hit with the latest in hemp stories and hemp education every week. We don’t bother you too much, and the stuff we do send you, it’s good stuff, trust me.

Matt Baum: Be sure to follow us on social media @MinistryOfHemp on Twitter, /MinistryofHemp on Facebook, and feel free to shoot me an email, Matt@ministryofhemp.com with your hemp-related questions, or you can call me too, 402-819-6417. Leave a message and Kit, who I mentioned earlier, the Editor in Chief of ministryofhemp.com, and I might answer your questions on one of our Q&A shows. These can be questions about any part of the hemp business. We love to hear from you so please send us your questions.

Matt Baum: For now, this is Matt Baum with Ministry of Hemp Podcast reminding you take care of yourself, take care of others, and make good decisions, will you? This is the Ministry of Hemp wishing you a happy new year, and signing off.

The post Hempcrete And Sustainable Construction With Mattie Meade appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

“Most people who go there have already discovered it’s made of hemp,” hemp advocate Dick Clarke told the Ministry of Hemp. “But they are surprised to see how normal it looks — what were they expecting I wonder?”

Continued Clarke:

“(They’re) equally surprised at how nice it feels inside, and how comfortable it is. This is when the lightbulbs go on about temperature and internal humidity control. It’s fun to watch. Then when they start talking, excitedly, they are blown away by the quiet acoustics.”

‘The most comfortable home I have ever slept in’

Clarke from Sydney-based firm Envirotecture won the Paul Dass Memorial Prize in the BDA National Design Awards, for outstanding building design for the house near Mudgee, northwest of Sydney.

He has been building hemp homes since 2013. AK Constructions Mudgee built the award-winning house, with a design by Envirotecture, and the hemp building materials supplied by Australian Hemp Masonry Company (AHMC).

“Having visited the house in a cold winter time, I can say that it is the most comfortable home I have ever slept in,” said Clarke.

“While there was frost on the ground outside, we slept under a light blanket, with no additional heating. The house has a sense of settled quietness which is hard to understand without experiencing it.”

The hemp home cost about $700,000. Thats about 15% more than a normal timber and fibre cement building. Clarke told us they’ve struggled to get Australia’s construction code to acknowledge the unique benefits of hempcrete and the Grattai house.

It’s not the only award-winning hemp home in Australia. In 2017 “Balanced Earth” in Byron Bay, a trendy spot on the country’s east coast, won the New South Wales Master Builders Award for Energy Efficient Housing.

AHMC have been developing the Australian hemp construction industry since 1999 and supply Building Code of Australia (BCA) compliant green building products, consulting services and also give training and advice.

AHMC manufacture lime binder, hemp-lime render, and insulation products in Sydney. Their materials are low-embodied energy, thermally efficient and greatly reduce energy use in buildings. They developed and tested them over six years at the Australian Centre for Construction Innovation at the University of New South Wales, and then for a further six years in the field.

Hempcrete homes built regularly in Australia

Klara Marosszeky, AHMC managing director, said they had built 140 hemp homes. With multiple occupants living in them there could be a total 400 people residing in a hemp house thanks to AHMC.

AHMC builds houses on a regular basis in Tasmania, Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria. They were about to start on homes in Queensland and South Australia, as well as New Zealand. There are currently nine builds underway, mostly in New South Wales but also in Victoria and Western Australia. This was despite the misconception, she said, that Australia didn’t have its own hempcrete building products.

“We’ve had feedback from people from homes in Mudgee for example where it’s been 40 plus degrees for over a week and it doesn’t get hotter than 27 inside a hemp home,” Marosszeky told the Ministry of Hemp.

“So (hempcrete) works thermally in a whole range of ways. 

She continues “It’s light thermal mass, it’s highly insulative and because it’s a breathable material (it’s) vapor permeable, it draws moisture out of the atmosphere, so deals with humidity very well.”

In February, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, declared the 2018-19 summer the hottest on record. 

Meanwhile regional New South Wales is undergoing a record drought, which is where hemp — a drought-resilient hardy crop that can guarantee farmers income during these periods — also comes in.  

‘Miracle house’ made from hemp

The manager of a community radio network in Victoria also installed two unrendered hemp walls during the retrofit of his home. He discovered working there was the equivalent of working in a sound booth. He’s now building a hemp music studio, said Marosszeky. 

One award-winning house in the Sydney, built under the city’s flight path also has both acoustic and thermally insulative benefits thanks to hemp.

The house has a sense of settled quietness which is hard to understand without experiencing it.

Dick Clarke, award-winning hempcrete architect

Others hemp homes in Australia include a family with teenage aged triplets with muscular dystrophy who require wheelchairs. Clarke designed their house in central-west New South Wales. Locals dubbed it a “miracle house.”

“What had to be designed was a home where three people in wheelchairs could get around without busting the house to pieces,” said Marosszeky.

“In a normal home that wouldn’t work so it’s sort of like a mini hospital size building. And the community built it.”

Australias first commercial hempcrete building

More recently AHMC carried out their first commercial build at the Innovation Centre at the Cape Byron Rudolf Steiner School in Byron Bay in New South Wales. It’s Australia’s first commercial hemp building. AHMC consider construction of the new maths and science centre a major milestone for hempcrete in Australia. 

Marosszeky first began looking at hemp in the mid-1990s when she started searching or an alternative to timber, not to stop using it altogether, but to use it more carefully.

“We haven’t got our heads around forests and how much we need how much vegetation we need to keep going on the planet to be able to harvest the amount of emissions that are out there,” she said.

“Hemp just immediately goes into that and it has this history of durability.” 

Marosszeky continued: “It has the health benefits, so good indoor air quality, and then it hits these targets for thermal efficiency.”

Training others in Australia to build hempcrete homes 

Marosszeky has run workshops for years, teaching people to build hemp houses, providing formal and hands on training on building with hemp masonry or hemp lime construction materials for builders, building designers, architects and owner builders. 

This could be a pole structure, standard pine frame or construction which starts on stone in wet or tropical areas or cold regions. AHMC distributes training manuals which detail everything needed for a code compliant home.

In Australia, there is demand for hempcrete homes for health. 

“We know what is inside our buildings is making us sick,” said Marosszeky, adding that molds don’t grow in hemp buildings because they have breathable walls.

“A huge amount of buildings in Australia and everywhere in the world have got molds, molds are responsible for about 75% of allergies with respiratory and skin allergies.”

“She added: “so it’s quite an important thing to not have molds in your home because that’s what’s triggering all of your allergies.” 

AHMC also work closely with farmers and processors in Australia. They are currently setting up for early stage investment. 

The post Hempcrete In Australia: Hemp To The Rescue During Heat & Drought appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

Here’s some hemp clothing we love! Hemp is more fashion forward than ever and brands are doing amazing things with hemp fabric. Hemp fabric is more sustainable too, thanks to the use of fewer pesticides and other harmful chemicals.

We did some searching and picked out some awesome hemp pieces from clothing brands that everyone needs to check out!

Hemp Fashion Brands in This Video

• The Hemp Temple
• Jungmaven
• WAMA
• Toad & Co.
• ANARA Hemp Denim
  

More About Sustainable Fashion and Hemp

Here are more articles about hemp and sustainable fashion:

• Hemp Fabric Lab & Hemp In India
• Hemp Horizon Brings Flowing Elegance To Women’s Hemp Fashion
• How Cotton Is Killing The Earth
• How Hemp Fabric Is Made & Why It’s Better

The post Sustainable Fashion: Hemp Clothing We Love appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

It took becoming versed in “The Emperor Wears No Clothes,” world travel, and going back to school to study earth sciences and anthropology for Chad Kaimanu Jackson to come up with hemp surfboards.

“I was learning of the great legacy of hemp in ancient China and up to the founding of the US. And in my study of human history and attempting to integrate the concepts of sustainability in my scientific and academic career I found myself in a bit of cognitive dissonance,” says Jackson.

“I knew I had a mission to incorporate my life as a surfer, a Native Hawaiian, and a scientist into contributing to the sustainability/conservation movement in tandem with the cultural revival that was occurring with Indigenous Nations.”

Creating Hemp Surboards

Jackson, 39, has been building surfboards since a young age and started wearing hemp clothes in 2001. For the past 15 years the surfer, who has competed on the Big Wave Tour, has been the primary hemp surfboard builder in the surfing world.

He initially began using an alternative form of surfboard foam based from soybean oils, but became interested in using hemp in any way after becoming involved with the Hemp Museum, a nonprofit originally located in Santa Cruz, and its store.

Jackson briefly made boards for the store before starting to construct his own after gaining sponsorship through Hawaiian-based surf brand Da Hui. He also had a stint with Local Clothing.

In 2007, Jackson started HempSurf. Today he has support from brand Vissla who help him with the boards as well as his surfing and science work.

Other alternative materials Jackson uses in his surfboards include recycled redwood, flax, agave wood core, and bio-based resins and epoxies.

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in hemp surfboards, says the surfer.

“(It) is a simple delayed response of the public and surf communities finally catching on to the sustainability movement, which in terms of hemp, has been fueled by the recent legalization of hemp agriculture, (the) CBD industry, and the prevalence of Instagram and other social media outlets,” says Jackson.

Compared to the price of conventional surfboards, Jackson says the cost of a hemp surfboard is virtually the same. Shortboards are priced between $500 – $600 while a longboard ranges from between $800 and $1,000 and agave boards start at $1,500.

Hemp Surfboards Enable An ‘Indigenous Cultural Revival’

It’s important that hemp is recognised as it has the ability to offset environmental impacts derived from corporate agriculture, big pharma, and the petro-chemical industry, stresses Jackson.

“The organic nature is superior to synthetic materials in the overall life energy the fibers carry, the strength-to-weight ratios are the strongest found in nature (along with flax), superior flexura,” he says.

“This carries over to sustainable agriculture, economics, indigenous cultural revival and empowerment, and celebrates our connection with our ancestors and the tools they have passed on to us.”

He is currently involved in a film project about the Hawaiians who brought surfing to Santa Cruz in 1885.

“The film will segue into how suffers can come together to solve environmental problems and mobilize as a very powerful and influential subculture,” says Jackson.

Kea Eubank’s interest in hemp started over 15 years ago, when he was looking for better alternatives to smoking with butane lighters and matches. Hemp was the way forward. Eubank, born and bred in Maui, and his partner Miranda Campbell formulated “the hemp wick,” a term Eubank says is now used by over 70 different companies, and the first hemp wick company, Bee Line Hemp Wick. Bee Line combines hemp and beeswax, both ancient and renewable resources used in lighting medicinal herbs, pipes and fine cigars, and hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes.

“(We) came to realize how versatile hemp is, and have been looking for other uses ever since, which tends to keep us pretty busy, as there are thousands,” says Eubank.

Using Hemp In A Unique Way For Surfing

About three years ago Bee Line Hemp Wick partnered with Conway Bixby of Bixby Surfboards, a board shaper and river surfer in Bend, Oregon, and began making surfboards out of made out of recycled foam and organic hemp fiber in place of fiberglass.

“We were hoping we could trade out even more of the standard surfboard materials for hemp while maintaining the high performance,” says Eubank.

The hemp comes from Romania in eastern Europe, which Eubank, 38, says he’s found to have the best organic hemp in the world.

“They use a traditional process called retting where they let the hemp break down in the field and then finish with machine processing it into long strands which they spin/twist back together,” he says.

“A lot of other manufacturers use chemicals to break down their hemp to a pulp, and then bleach it.”

Bee Line Wick uses the hemp in a unique way to make the boards, using hemp fibers instead of fiberglass, wrapping the recycled foam in hemp.

“I’m not sure if anybody is doing it quite like us,” says Eubank.

‘Stoked To Have A Hemp Surfboard In Their Quiver’

The boards, which he says start at $650 but vary in price depending on size, are popular.

“Half the people love that they utilize hemp and the other half just love how they look,” says Eubank.

“(Customers are) mostly river surfers, and then there’s people just stoked on anything hemp and to have a hemp surfboard in their quiver.”

Eubank says traditional materials used to make surfboards are chemical-based.

“Surfers naturally want to keep the earth and ocean clean because they are immersed in the elements daily,” says Eubank.

“Hemp, if processed responsibly has a lot less impact on the earth, while (the board is) being made, and in the end when the board is no longer surfable.”

The post Hemp Surfboards: Riding The Wave Of Hemp Hype With A New Kind Of Board appeared first on Ministry of Hemp.

After launching her hemp business with her husband, Maxine Woodhouse didn’t want to concentrate on products she felt were already being done, like oil and protein power.

So she chose something that would stand out – hemp beeswax food wraps.

Available in funky retro tie dyed colors, which makes them perfect for a dinner party, you might say they really are the bees’ knees of food wraps.

“We decided we wanted to have something different because we want our business to be a bit unique from everyone else, so we went ‘okay what if we dyed them and dipped them and we get our beeswax’,” Maxine Shea, co-founder of Australian-based business Hemp Collective and Fields of Hemp, told us.

LOCAL BEESWAX & HEMP COMBINE FOR SUSTAINABLE HEMP FOOD WRAPS

The locally made wraps, which can be purchased online, are all-natural, anti-bacterial and anti-fungal, water-resistant and sustainable.

The beeswax is sourced locally and infused with organic coconut oil and pine tree resin from the Byron Bay community in northern NSW, not far from where Shea and her husband and business co-founder Mike have a hemp farm for industrial use.

“People go ‘oh is it farmed from bees that are being harmed’ and we went ‘well no the bee keepers look after their bees,’” Maxine said.

With a background that includes studying and teaching about waste education, the product also fits in with the ethos of the couple and their business.

“We came up with the hemp beeswax wrap because we’re trying to eliminate plastic within our business. I come from that zero waste (belief) and also moving forward I think it’s important to do that for society,” Maxine said.

“There’s so much going on with plastic at the moment that it is an unsustainable product and it is killing a lot of wildlife, so the beeswax wraps made sense.”

Perfect for storing food and keeping produce fresh – from vegetables and fruits to flowers to kids’ lunches – the list of uses for the wraps is endless, say the Hemp Collective.

The biodegradable wraps, which can be moulded into a pouch or cone (no pun intended) are also easy to use, are water-resistant, and are easy to wash.

FROM HEMP FOOD WRAPS TO HEMP PAPER: HEMP IS WHERE WE ARE

Following their launch, the Hemp Collective unveiled their hemp paper and hemp business cards.

“I couldn’t find any hemp business cards. I thought ‘no one’s actually making them in Australia’,” the entrepreneur said.

“We went ‘okay you know what we could actually do wedding invitations, we could do all sorts of things with it.’ But the business cards were what we started out with.”

The fact that it’s a premium product again sets it aside from the others that do exist, Maxine said.

The Hemp Collective’s soaps come in myrtle, activated charcoal, lavender oil, peppermint and eucalyptus, and oatmeal flavors. Ingredients include organic cold pressed coconut oil, purified water, Australian hemp seed oil, and organic unrefined shea butter.

“There’s probably seven ingredients in there and it’s all either organic or Australian,” Maxine said.

Next up they will launch their hemp shampoo and conditioner bar range. A healing balm is also in the pipeline.

The main concern for their products, Mike said, is that they are producing high quality.

“We made sure that we got not just any coconut oil, we made sure that it either came from a sustainable source but also good quality,” he says.

“The same with the shea butter.”

MAKING HEMP FANS IN AN AUSTRALIAN TOURISM HOT SPOT

The couple’s business is based in the small town of Mullumbimby, not far from the tourist hot spot Byron Bay, with a wall of hemp that the community helped make for their office.

“We said we’re going to build this hemp wall. Ten people (said) ‘oh we’ll come and help’,” Maxine said.

“We hand harvested that hemp. The community has been amazing around here.”

The couple, who have been together for 17 years, were based in New Zealand, where they had a distribution company, before they moved to Australia in 2017.

Maxine had earlier given birth to the couple’s son who was diagnosed with a severe form of eczema. Maxine was later diagnosed with a brain tumor, a type that affects only one to two per cent of people. In New Zealand, they were given some CBD oil.

“When we came over here, we did a whole change and we looked at hemp and went yeah, I think there’s something in this,” Mike said.

“And then the food law changed (in November 2017) and that’s when we thought ‘well this is what’s going to get the wheels moving for the hemp industry.’”

The couple say they have recurring customers and their main customers are probably mostly female, but their ages are different.

“The soap gets an older demographic whereas we feel like shampoo bars and conditioner bars are going to be good for that travellers 18 – 35 type age groups where they’re kind of on the move,” Maxine said.

“It’s perfect for travel, you just shove it in your bag. You don’t have to carry all these big bottles.”

“Artists are loving the paper.”

HOPES FOR HEMP’S FUTURE IN AUSTRALIA

Maxine said there’s also some exciting things happening “behind the scenes”.

“We really want to start getting some infrastructure happening around the region, farmers growing but growing so they’re actually going to get better yields and outputs and also money because farmers are always struggling,” she said.

She said the Australian hemp industry was “stifled due to a range of different things”.

“It’s stifled due to thought process the fact that there’s stigma around the products,” Maxine said.

“Australia is behind due to its crazy policies.”

Maxine said her vision for the hemp community in Australia was one where people could collaborate but every single person could still have a niche within their business that sets them, their story, and their product apart.

“If everyone can work together you’ve actually got a bigger way of talking to government and getting things changed,” she said.

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Hemp packaging could be a solution to the problem of disposable, single-use paper and plastic.

Update December 16, 2020: Sana Packaging founders visited the Ministry of Hemp podcast to discuss how they started their hemp plastic packaging company, after forming Ron Vasak-Smith, CEO, and James Eichner

Hemp packaging could replace disposable, single-use plastic

“The statistics are in: every second … a half acre of trees are cut down,” said Matthew Glyer of Hemp.Press. “7.5 bllion trees for paper alone is not sustainable.”

Every industry is struggling with the growing problem of waste. The legal cannabis industry is no exception. Most medical and recreational dispensaries use single-use plastic and foil containers. Consumers throw them away after consuming the products inside. For the most part, these materials are not biodegradable. Single-use paper packaging is also commonplace in the industry.

Researches haven’t perfected hemp plastic, yet. Meanwhile, companies like Sana Packaging are already creating composites from hemp and corn. Sana Packaging’s products combine hemp hurd, the fibrous woody core of agricultural hemp, with corn to create composite bioplastic.

Working with domestically-sourced materials also ensures the sustainability of their products. Sana Packaging sources all their hemp domestically, from Kentucky, then processes it in North Dakota.

“We manufacture in Minnesota and Arizona,” said Ron Basak-Smith of Sana Packaging. “All American made, all American supply chain.”

Hemp.Press also targets the cannabis industry with products that replace boxes or display cards made from trees with hemp paper.

Both companies want to change the laws, too. Currently, most states with legal medical or recreational marijuana programs prohibit the re-use of packaging at cannabis dispensaries. Ideally, consumers would use refillable packaging that they could bring to the dispensary over and over.

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