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Showing posts with label Hemp Hurd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hemp Hurd. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

why not build with hemp

Article Repost: Hemp Fiberboard Poised To Replace Plywood By Monocle Man
 https://www.hcmagazine.com/hemp-fiberboard-poised-to-replace-plywood/?
by Skyler Cannabaceae
Images Added to blog post: MOhemp
Want to support legal hemp production, but not sure how? It can be as simple as choosing hemp fiberboard over plywood for your next building project. Take a few tips from the experts into consideration.

Ryan Loflin, 41, is Colorado’s hemp farming pioneer. He saw the potential in hemp last year when he used his dad’s farm in southern Colorado to grow hemp after Colorado legalized the practice. 

THC caught up with Greg Flavell last week in New Zealand where he is building houses. 
Flavell owns Hemp Technologies, a hemp building company based in Asheville, North Carolina. He points out that hemp not only saves trees, but it is more efficient.

Trees take 10 years to grow. Hemp only takes four or five months.” Flavell said. So there it is, in a nutshell – the first advantage of hemp fiberboard over wood.
Other Great Points in article:
A Congressional Research Service (CSR) “Industrial hemp production statistics for Canada indicate that one acre of hemp yields … an average of 5,300 pounds of straw, which can be transformed into about 1,300 pounds of fiber. “

 U.S. Department of Agriculture reveals that a single acre of trees produces less than one-fourth the amount of fiber from an acre of hemp.

“The longest bundle of fibers in an old-grown Douglas Fir is three-quarters of an inch.” Tim Pate explained. “If you take a hemp plant, that bast fiber on the outside is going to be as long as that plant is tall.”

Pate was a member of the company that teamed up with Washington State University to create “medium-density fiberboard” (MDF) from hemp, so he knows his stuff.

Not only is the fiber longer than wood, but it is higher quality. C & S Specialty Building Supply, a now-defunct Oregon-based business that included Pate, Bill Conde, Dave Seber and Barry Davis, brought the idea to a Washington State University researcher named Paul Maulberg. Together they created a hemp MDF prototype that met or exceeded all tests.

“If you can find a non-toxic way to create building materials, you could win a Nobel Peace Prize.” Pate said. The MDF project closed in on that goal, showing just how well non-toxic hemp was suited for building.

“That fiber doesn’t break down after just a few seconds,” he said, referring to hemp fiber in a steam exploder. This is important because the extraction process is used to bond the strong hemp fiber with other materials to create composite materials such as hemp MDF.

The hemp fiberboard created at WSU proved in tests to be stronger than steel and a report issued by the Boulder Hemp Initiative Project shows that not only does hemp stand up to force, but heat and water as well.

“Hemp hurds can be pressed and injected with phenolic resin to make a particle board that is resistant to fire and water,” Pate said. “The board also makes a good insulation and thermal barrier.”


With all of these benefits, why not build with hemp?




Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Hemp: A Source Biomass Antibacterial Fibers

Cannabis sativa: The Plant of the Thousand and One Molecules

Plant lignocellulosic biomass is an abundant renewable resource, which can provide biopolymers, fibers, chemicals and energy (Guerriero et al., 201420152016). 


Trees are important for the provision of wood, however, also fast-growing herbaceous species, like textile hemp (which has a THC content <0.3%; Weiblen et al., 2015), can provide high biomass quantities in a short time. The stem of this fiber crop supplies both cellulosic and woody fibers: the core is indeed lignified, while the cortex harbors long cellulose-rich fibers, known as bast fibers (Figure 1) (Guerriero et al., 2013).
FIGURE 1
www.frontiersin.org
FIGURE 1. Anatomical details of Cannabis stem. (A) Stem of an adult plant (ca 2 months); (B) The stem can be peeled off and shows a lignified core and a cortex with bast fibers. (C) Longitudinal section of hemp stem stained with toluidine blue 
showing the cortex with a bundle of bast-fibers (white asterisk) and the core with xylem vessels (black asterisk).





This heterogeneous cell wall composition makes hemp stem an interesting model to study secondary cell wall biosynthesis, in particular the molecular events underlying the deposition of cortical gelatinous bast fibers and core woody fibers.
Cannabis woody fibers (a.k.a “hurds” or “shivs”) are used for animal bedding because of their high absorption capacity and for the creation of a concrete-like material.
Hemp bast fibers are used in the biocomposite sector as a substitute of glass fibers. The automotive industry is particularly keen on using hemp bast fibers to produce bioplastics: this material is stronger than polypropylene plastic and lighter in weight (Marsh, 2003).
Beyond the applications in the construction and automotive industries, hemp fibers are attractive also in the light of their natural antibacterial property. Hemp bast fibers have been indeed described as antibacterial (Hao et al., 2014Khan et al., 2015) and their use for the manufacture of an antibacterial finishing agent (Bao et al., 2014), surgical devices (Gu, 2006) or functionalized textiles (Cassano et al., 2013) has been reported. This property is linked to the chemical composition of hemp bast fibers: both free and esterified sterols and triterpenes have been identified, among which β-sitosterol and β-amyrin (Gutiérrez and del Río, 2005). These compounds possess known antibacterial properties (Kiprono et al., 2000Ibrahim, 2012). Hemp bast fibers were also found to contain cannabinoids (2% of the total metabolite extract) (Bouloc et al., 2013 and references therein). More recently hemp hurd powder showed antibacterial properties against Escherichia coli (Khan et al., 2015). Since the hurd has a higher lignin content than the bast fibers, its antibacterial property may be linked to lignin-related compounds such phenolic compounds, as well as alkaloids and cannabinoids (Appendino et al., 2008Khan et al., 2015).

Hemp Stem: A Source of Fibers with Antibacterial Properties

REVIEW ARTICLE

Front. Plant Sci., 04 February 2016 |http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2016.00019

Christelle M. Andre*Jean-Francois Hausman and Gea Guerriero

  • Environmental Research and Innovation, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg


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