HEMP A CLEAN RESOURCE FOR A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY

Everybody keeps talking about the environment, but quite often in the wrong way. In fact, in spite of many debates, whenever there is a possibility of replacing oil with natural renewable raw materials, nobody takes any notice. It is certainly very hard today to imagine developed economies using no oil, cutting down no trees as we do today for paper, using no chemicals products. As difficult as it is to imagine a wealthy society without garbage deposits, without the greenhouse effect and all the other environmental disasters we have got used to. And yet, there is real solid hope: this hope comes from hemp. With hemp by - products it is possible to produce, in a clean and economical way: textiles, paper, plastics, paints, fuels, building materials and an extremely high quality dietetic oil. Hemp has been, among cultivated species, one of the few known from ancient times both in the East, then in the West. In China it has been used since prehistory to produce ropes and textiles, and more than 2000 years ago it produced the first sheet of paper. In the Mediterran area, Phoenicians used hemp sails for their boats. In the Po plain hemp has been cultivated for the textile fiber since Roman times. But what are hemp's raw materials and what products can we obtain from them?  MATERIALS - Hemp is a plant with a high, slim stalk, with the top covered by leaves. It can reach 4 metres in height and more. The fiber part of its stalk is called "bast" and the wooden part is called "hard". Hemp can be grown mainly for two purposes: the textile fiber or the seeds. If hemp is grown for the fiber, the crop must be harvested immediately after blooming. In this phase you get: 20% textile fibers, 10% tow, and 70% wood. If grown for the seeds, the fiber part is entirely made of tow, that means of a lower quality fiber, unfit for textile use. An important quality ofthe hemp plant it is its productivity. It is the most productive plant in terms of vegetable mass of all the temperate zone: a three months 1/2 cultivation produces a bio - mass 4 times more than the same surface of a woood in 1 year. Many farmers would like to start growing hemp again also because of its speed of growth: it takes all the light and suffocates the weeds on the ground, working better than herbicides. And here it is what can be obtained from these raw materials. TEXTILES - Hemp plant, it is a textile fiber which produces more than cotton and today it can be processed in factories substituting the long hard manual work of the past. Its cultivation requires few pesticides and fertilizers, while cotton is very polluting requiring many more pesticides. Furthermore, hemp fiber is stronger and lasts longer. It can be processed to make it as thin as needed and it is suggested as substitute of cotton and synthetic fibers.  SEEDS AND DDIETETIC OIL - So hemp can also be grown for the seeds that contain high biological value proteins in terms of 24%, and oil with 30 to 40%. For their nutritional value, hemp seeds have been suggested as a remedy to the protein needs in developing countries. The oil qualities are great. It is particulary rich in unsaturated fats, and it is ideal to correct the diet and prevent cardiocirculatory diseases. The oil can also be used with great advantage for industrial purposes: it is not by chance that it has been compared to whale oil. Paints made with this oil do not pollute and are of superior quality compared to those made from mineral oil. We can also produce soaps, cosmetics, really biodegradable washing powders, lubricating oil.  PAPER - Once the textile fiber has been extracted, or after seeds have been collected, what is left is the wooden part, which is not a simple by - product, but another very important raw material. With the tow it is possible to produce high quality paper, thin and strong. With the short cellulose fiber of the wood we can make everyday paper as for newspapers, cardboards etc. Making paper with the fiber and the wood of hemp brings together several advantages: first of all for the enormous productivity in terms of vegetable mass, and also because it can be obtained by a single cultivation together with the textile fiber of the seeds. Another advantage point for hemp is the low percentage of lignin compared to the wood of the trees, containing about 20% together with the same amount of other binding substances. Today, the big paper companies use only wood from trees. The process to obtain the clean cellulose microfiber, and therefore the mass for the paper, requires a great amount of acids to dissolve the wood. This phase, expensive and polluting, is unnecessary for hemp paper obtained from the single fibre, and about its wood, it requires less than half the quantity of acids. Furthermore, the fiber and the wood hemp are white, and the paper we get from the plant is basically ready to be printed. To make it just a bit whiter, it is enough to treat it with hydrogen perhoxide instead of products made of clorine needed for wood paper. These chemicals are among the main causes for the thin ozone layer in our atmosphere.  BOARDS - With the whole wooden stalks of hemp, pressed together with a glue, it is possible to obtain boards for building and carpentry replacing wood, they are very strong, flexible and lighter in weight.  PLASTIC MATERIALS - With the cellulose of which hemp is rich, through a polymerization process we can get plastic materials, even if not yet at the same level with many sophisticated plastics of today, and have very important uses as insulating materials, packing and so on.  FUELS - Hemp, for its high revenue in vegetable mass, is also considered the ideal plant for the production of biomass fuels substituting those from mineral oil. Burning hemp fuels in fact does not raise the greenhouse effect. The carbon dioxide is first taken from the atmosphere during the plant growth and returned to the air while burning the fuel. In this way the carbon dioxide quantity in the atmosphere does not grow, exactly the contrary of what happens burning fossil hydrocarbons. If it is true that with hemp we can produce all these things, and many more, why are the qualities of this plant known by few and so little used? The main reason is because its cultivation stopped long ago. In Italy it was grown in the Po plain for the textile fibre, and in Campania (Naples area) because of the seeds. In the 50s the cultivation had to stop because it was not economically viable any more, compared with cotton and synthetic fibers. In the States, the production of paint from hemp oil was very popular until 1937 when, long before Italy, the government forbid its use together with marijuana. In Italy the law against marijuana arrived when hemp cultivation had already stopped. We must underline that, even if from a botanical point of view we keep talking of "cannabis sativa", from the varieties cultivated for fiber and seeds it is not possible to make any drug. But the point is, after such a long interruption in its cultivation, it is now very hard to start it again. Growing hemp and its working processes must be planned all over again from the very beginning. For many reasons it is impossible to work hemp manually as it was in the past, we need new technologies. For example rettering hemp to take the fibre from the plant would need a new type of factories where farmers could bring the plant after drying it. These factories can soon be built, the processes have been already analyzed. It is now necessary to plan the whole process from the farmers to the final product, and start the whole mechanism. A farmer cannot start producing hemp if there is no factory to bring it to, and the factory cannot work without farmers bringing the material.There are, in any case, several factors working towards the start of this production. Both in Europe and in the Northern America farmers have been long searching for new crops to enlarge the market towards new sectors, different from food. Even the European community is interested in promoting new crops that are not aimed at becoming food, and it has been noted that hemp is one of the most promising. For this reason, the European Community has decided to finance hemp farmers and to sustain research focusing on the working processes. These are various indications which show that, beyond environmental considerations, there is a whole section of the economy moving toward a natural based production instead than one based on mineral oil. Even the market is ready to receive hemp products. Today there are already hundreds of companies which, using materials coming from countries where hemp cultivation never stopped, produce several articles with this plant; textiles and clothes, cooking seed oil and soaps, cosmetics, paints, paper, washing powders, boards and other building components, furniture and design pieces, and so on. Some of these companies saw their income growing up to 500% in a single year. The problem today is that demand is still higher than the supply and prices are often high. Some of these products, like textiles, are very hard to find. All this to show that the relaunch of hemp will be sustained by a public opinion fully aware of the fact that hemp can solve many of our environmental problems. It is also clear that times are ready to move toward large sale production. What actually slows down the development and the consumers's enthusiasm for this sector is in fact the limited raw materials available.

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