Photo courtesy of Tommygibbons46 from Wikimedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 Nate Berg @Nate_Berg October 6, 2020 — It has become almost a cliché to discuss the benefits of hemp, the supposed wonder plant with almost endless uses — from woven fibers to edible seeds to bioplastics. “Of course, hemp is that magic crop that does everything,” says Nicholas Carter, an environmental researcher who, along with Tushar Mehta, a Toronto-based doctor, runs the website Plant Based Data . His work involves reading through scientific papers and studies and summarizing the most important work supporting plants as a source of food and other important uses. Given the hype, Carter wondered just how much power hemp really had. “I wanted to see the research out there on it, to see what’s actually real, what’s actually backed by evidence,” he says. Magic? Not exactly. But Carter came away from his attempted debunking a hemp believer. And one of the most promising of its many uses, he found, is its application as a building material known as hempcrete. Although not a direct replacement for concrete, hempcrete has many benefits as a building material. Photo courtesy of IsoHemp Like its namesake concrete, hempcrete is […]
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