Hemp Houses for Australia
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 04.23.08
One of the people excited about NSW’s newly legal industrial hemp crops is researcher Klara Marosszeky. She has been developing a commercial viable hemp building material, and will now be able to source her raw materials locally rather than trucking them all the way across the country.
A project of Klara’s has been hemp concrete. Mixing hemp hurds (the pithy core of the stem) with a lime-based binder, plus water and a little sand, sets off a chemical reaction akin to petrification. The fibre becomes a mineral and sets like cement and can be moulded into robust building blocks. These are fire-retardant, pest proof and light, while still having the ability to ‘breath’- allowing the passage of moisture vapour.
This is, strictly speaking, not new technology. Three years ago we mentioned that Ireland was revising the process. (They even wrote book on it: Building With Hemp.) The Irish were, in turn, picking up on work that had been done in France, where many stone-like buildings, including century old bridges, have used this remarkable material. And some time ago we noted a British brewer who had used hemcrete, as some call it, to construct their massive distribution centre. And just this month, American Lime Technology (AMT) announced they were now the exclusive North American distributor of Hemcrete construction materials.
But back to Klara Marosszeky, who has been pursuing her Australian variant of the process with the University of New South Wales since 2003. "We've developed the material for blocks, sprayed walls, panels and in-fill.” She said, adding “You can grow enough hemp for a house on one hectare in four months.” Part of her research has been in making the product 'commercially competitive', "because I realised there was no point in having a sustainable product that cost an awful lot to build with."
And at the end of the building’s life she suggests you can fertilse your garden with the refuse or break the material down and reconstitute it into a new wall. Via ::Echo News and ABC
Hemp has been developed for many other construction applications, including insulation, wood oil, and building bales.
See also: TreeHugger Eco-tip: Hemp.
This sounds good.
But then so does biofuel until you realize the possible impact of using so vast areas of land to grow 'fuel'.
I'd like to see stats on the comparable impact of this to conventional building materials, especially as sand and a lime binder are needed. (As it must be for many readers, growing the matierals on one hectare in four months means nothing to me, I'm afraid.) What is actually being saved and what are those savings worth compared to the land necessaray for planting and the water, chemicals, man/machinery hours/resources needed to grow and harvest the crop?
The recycling option does sound promising as opposed to dumping debris in landfill.
Steve N. Lee
author of eco-blog http://www.lionsledbysheep.com
and eco-suspense thriller 'What if...?'
i support what you are doing the saving of trees and stop destroying of our eath has to end just remember to keep the costs down just find someone to continue henry fords work and deveope a vehicile to run on hemp fuel
hemp needs to be used as biofuel...
VoteHemp.com
Great to see an Aussie out there researching methods to "grow" houses. I will certainly be one customer that will be buying a hemp house when they are available.
I do hear the argument though of how many acres will it take to grow. Will we see trees being cut down to grow hemp? I hope not and don't believe so.
In the mean time I will continue to help spread the word.