Hempcrete: Creating Holistic Sustainability With Plant-Based Building Materials

Hemp is one of the oldest crops domesticated by humans. With its wide variety of uses and applications, it’s easy to understand why it’s been a desirable product throughout history. Hemp seeds and flowers are used in health foods, medicines, and organic beauty products; the fibers and stalks of the hemp plant are used in clothing, paper, and biofuel. Today even a waste product of hemp fiber processing, so-called hemp shives, is being utilized to create sustainable building materials like hempcrete.  Hempcrete is a bio-aggregate concrete, where the hemp shives - small pieces of wood from the stalk of the plant - are mixed with either a lime or mud cement to create a durable, eco-friendly building material. Hempcrete is lightweight and non-structural, but can instead be integrated with traditional building construction systems. Similar to traditional concrete, it can be either cast-in-place or prefabricated into building components like blocks or sheets.