Well let’s just be clear here- there is a difference between “everything made with plastic can be made with hemp...” and “let’s make everything with hemp.” There are two factors to consider. First is that you CAN paint your house with food coloring. It’s not the best idea though. Some applications aren’t well suited for some things. Second is that replacing ALL plastic with hemp plastic means HUGE upscaling of hemp. It means massive industrial farming applications. Pesticides, fertilizers, deforestation- what do you think they do with the cleated land in the Amazon? It’s largely used to meet crop demands. There’s no single magic bullet for environmental and social problems- but replacing many plastics with hemp ones could be a great idea.
Yes. It is a good point, and another potential benefit to these resources. Potential is key. Hemp and bamboo are both pest resistant and require little to no fertilizer. Hemp grows very close and this can often compete out weeds. That said... for large scale industrial processing- there are limits to spacing of crops to allow machines to work- and even the small number of weeds that could creep up could harm productivity. So many current large scale bamboo and hemp industrial operations still use pesticides anyway to maximize yield and help minimize non cash crops in the harvest further. Fertilizer is also used in many large scale volume operations in order to increase returns. So how environmentally friendly the crops are partially depends on the ethics and practices of growers and transporters and users etc.
But going to spacing- an industrial farm can plant 400,000 hemp plants per acre. That acre will yield somewhere around 1300lbs of dry fiber and 22 gallons of oil. To get that yield you’ll need about 80-130 gallons of water per 2.2lbs of dry fiber. The USA alone uses about 1.7million barrels of oil for plastic production a day. Using pure hemp plastic (not mixing hemp fiber with crude oil,) that’s several million acres harvested each day. A full hemp crop might take about 70-140days.
So if we attempted to completely replace crude oil based plastics with hemp (which we can’t presently as there are certain types and characteristics of other plastics we can’t yet replicate with hemp plastic,) even with the density potential of hemp- we would need many, many acres to do it. Hemp grows in many climates but your yields are just about quartered if the region doesn’t get 20-30 inches of rain or you don’t irrigate as stated. In use as a fuel or other places where the energy content of fuel per volume isn’t the same- this can be offset. And hemp is pretty universally better for the environment than corn at pretty much everything. But... not quite perfect.
I can’t find any information about the temperature tolerance of hemp plastic. That may be the real deciding factor. It sounds like maybe it’s comparable to ABS (what legos are made of), but ABS has a fairly low temperature range.
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