Much like with hemp plastic, which has the ability to cut down on our global plastic use, replacing it with a biodegradable material which doesn’t kill the environment to make, and hemp batteries, which are still being investigated as an alternative to the standard, hempcrete is hemp’s answer to building materials, and comes with massive benefits for both industrial and private building projects. Here’s a little on what it is, and how it can help.
There are tons of hempcrete benefits for industrial building, but that’s just one great aspect of the cannabis plant. Most of us are more familiar with it for its medical and recreational benefits. Much like the appearance of hempcrete, there are also tons of new products in the medical and recreational space, like THCV, THCA, and delta-8 THC. We encourage you to use hempcrete for building projects, but if you’re looking to take the edge off after working, take a look at our deals for delta-8 THC, and many other compounds, and be glad that expanding industries means lots of new options.
Standard building: concrete, cement and CO2 emissions
The first thing you’ll notice about hempcrete is that the name of the building material sounds much like the more well-known one that has been used in the last couple centuries for mass production in building materials, concrete. Concrete, and particularly cement, production account for a huge amount of CO2 emissions, meaning the standard building industry creates a lot of greenhouse gases, and leaves a major carbon footprint on the earth. This is more related to cement, while concrete production means digging into the ground and ruining the topsoil, which is the fertile, growing layer of soil.
Concrete is a hard, chemically inert building material made from an aggregate of (generally) sand and gravel, which is bonded by cement and water. Cement for its part, is a mixture of limestone, clay, and sand which is heated in a kiln to about 1450 Celsius to produce ‘cement clinker’, which becomes standard cement after it is cooled, ground down, and mixed with other substances. 40% of the emissions related to cement production have to do with the fuels used to heat the kilns. There is also 60% created in the process of lime being heated in the kiln, which releases CO2 into the kiln, in a process called calcination. This does create a carbon footprint in the manufacture of cement and concrete. All of this accounts for an entire 8% of global CO2 emissions.
Cement only makes up approximately 7-10% of concrete, the rest is the sand, gravel, and water. The making of concrete, and cement, essentially requires use of some of the more basic raw materials found on earth. The cement industry, through it’s release of carbon dioxide, actually accounts for as much as 25% of all industry CO2 emissions. This, along with the statistic that per each dollar of revenue, it produces the most CO2 emissions. While it is cement, and not the rest of concrete production that is responsible for this, cement is an integral part of making concrete, which means cement CO2 emissions have been very hard to get around.