Rapidly Renewable Hemp Flooring and Lumber

What if you had a natural building material that could be grown from seed to harvest in three to four months, is good at sequestering carbon, requires no fertilizer, helps fix nitrogen in the soils, requires little water, can be grown on a small plot so it can replace more polluting and/or slower-growing materials such as cotton or wood, and can be used in products ranging from textiles to animal feed to biobased plastics? Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, that is industrial hemp.

Industrial hemp—which contains almost none of the psychoactive substances found in its cousin, marijuana—was one of the first cultivated crops and was once one of the world’s most important materials, used for paper, ropes, animal feed, and more. But the rise of inexpensive plastics and petrochemicals meant less demand for hemp, and “Reefer Madness” drug fears led to the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937, effectively outlawing both marijuana and hemp in the U.S.