No doubt you ’ve heard the story about the liberal unsound Friedrich August Wolf that blew down the little pig ’s planetary house – you live , the cottage made fromstraw ? If that wolf was a friend of the environment , he probably would n’t have done that , because some straw houses , like the one built in 2010 by the University of Bath in Great Britain , are eco - friendly . British research worker built the Balehaus at Bath to study how renewable grammatical construction materials work . But central to the home ’s design isCannabis sativa , more commonly bonk as hemp [ origin : BBC ] .

While using hemp as a building material might seem like a fairy tale , it ’s not . The Europeans have build hundreds of homes using hemp as one of the master mental synthesis materials . Many ancient societies once used hemp for a miscellany of industrial purposes , and now the plant is enjoying a renaissance as builder seek to design more gullible buildings . And seemingly , hemp is not just renewable ( farmers can farm it almost anywhere ) , it ’s also exceedingly good for the environs . The flora significantly reduces the amount of nursery gases entering the standard atmosphere while it ’s growing [ source : BBC ] .

But do n’t confuse industrial hangman’s rope with its more familiar cousin , marijuana . Industrial hemp is crop to take down the level of the narcotictetrahydrocannabinol , or THC , the chemical substance that gives marijuana its " high " [ source : The Hemp Company ] . You ’d need to fume at least 10 industrial hemp cigarettes to get the same flavour from one marijuana joint [ reference : NAIHC ] .

One unwashed purpose of industrial hemp is for detachment . Go to the next page to find how hemp can help reduce your public utility bills .

The Energy of Hemp

Ishempthe edifice cloth of the future ? Perhaps . Houses built with hemp use less Energy Department , make less waste , and cost less money to heat or cool . Hemp can be fashioned into fiberboard , lightweight cementum roofing tile , dry wall and other wood - similar materials [ origin : Priesnitz ] .

But hemp asinsulationis one of the most popular ways to use the plant . Hemp insulates better than many other material , such as cotton or wool . Hemp detachment is a composite material , in which the plant ’s fibers are bound with another sum . It has a low U - time value , a measurement which gauges how much heat passes through a particular material . The low the uracil - value , the better the cloth insulates . In fact , Hemp insulation has a U - value of .040 , which is comparable to the U - value rate of 8 - inch of fiberglass insulation [ source : The Hemp Company andCombustion Research ] .

Hemp ’s R - value , which measure a cloth ’s electrical resistance to heat flow , is also good and similar to other unchewable detachment products – about R-3.5 per inch of thickness [ source : U.S. Department of Energy ] . The more the fabric curb the flow of heating system , the high its R - value .

Hemp also take in moisture , which reduce humidness and abridgement of the beleaguer melody , and inhibit the growth of mould [ beginning : The Hemp Company ] . While hemp insulation can avail a householder save money on vigor , its real advantage is that the plant is environmentally favorable . It take very little energy to grow and action hemp into insulating material . In addition , hemp scrubs the atm of greenhouse gas [ source : The Hemp Company ] .

So if hemp can be used as a edifice textile and is great insulator – plus it ’s environmentally friendly to boot , why are n’t more builders in the United States using it ? say on to find out out .

Homes that Hemp Can’t Build?

Russ Martin , the former mayor of Ashville , North Carolina , likes to joke that if his house burned down , his neighbors could party hearty . Martin built his 3,400 - straight - groundwork - home partially out of hemp [ source : CNN ] . Martin used Hemcrete to progress the paries of his house . Hemcrete , made by British company Lime Technology , fuse dried hemp stems with Citrus aurantifolia . worker take the moisture - loaded " shiv " and pelt it into paries forms . The slurry hardens , creating a thickconcrete - like wall with a high insulation value . A 12 - inch - blockheaded Hemcrete wall has an R - value of R-28 [ germ : Wilson ] .

It be Martin $ 133 per straight human foot to build the first hemp house in the United States , well above the 2009 U.S. norm of $ 83.89 [ seed : CNN ] . And in the South , where he live , he pay nigh twice the average cost of $ 76.77 per square metrical unit [ source : National Home Builders Association ] . So Martin is in the minority . But there might be more hemp base , and the prices would likely go down , if the U.S. governance legalized the refinement of industrial hemp . But the federal government classifies allCannabis sativaasmarijuana , even though industrial hemp has much less THC [ sourceVantreese ] .

Since it ’s still illegal to cultivate hemp , many U.S. suppliers are draw to spell industrial hemp products . And the damage for importing hemp building materials can be staggering , often make the construction of hemp homes too expensive [ informant : Building Green ] . But other countries are way ahead of the United States when it comes to hemp as an industrial dark-green crop . In Canada , for instance , hemp is the new immediate payment craw . In 2007 , Canada exported 862 tons ( 876 metric tons ) of industrial hemp , and 59 percent of that buy the farm to the United States [ source : Hanson ] .

Just two years subsequently in 2009 , U.S. Congressman Ron Paul introduced The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2010 that , if passed , would have let commercial-grade land of industrial hangman’s halter , and would have given state law-makers the authority to license and regulate the commercial production of halter as an agricultural commodity [ Hemp.org ] . Several states , including North Dakota , Montana and Vermont currently have regulation permit farming of industrial hangman’s halter under state law , but those Pentateuch ca n’t be implemented without federal approval .

That 2010 federal card failed to gain commendation , which imply hemp still has to spell from land like Canada and Europe , leaving homeowners concerned in green building material weighing the eco - benefit of hangman’s halter against its high cost .

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