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Hemp is that funky looking little plant that many get confused with the marijuana plant, and has been cultivated longer than any other textile fiber in history. They do look very similar and both do come from the plant family Cannabis sativa, but from very different varieties. The fiber-bearing plant has been bred for thousands of years for its long, fine fibers. Unfortunately for many, the fiber plant has zero drug value and the drug plant has zero fiber value.

Did You Know?

Levi Strauss made the first pair of jeans from lightweight hemp canvas.

Until the late 1800’s, virtually all of our cloth and paper were made from hemp.

Where Did It Go?
As you may already have guesses, big business got wind of the mounting potential losses in the multi-billions. In the late 1920s and 1930s Henry Ford and other U.S. companies were developing a wide variety of synthetic products from renewable biomass resources, notably hemp, and were promising to make every product that was currently being made from petroleum hydrocarbons from cannabis carbohydrates.

Meanwhile, the petro-chemical and pulp-paper industries in particular stood to lose billions of dollars if the commercial potential of hemp was fully realized. Randolph Hearst together with Lammont DuPont and other industrialists (backed by Andrew Mellon, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and owner of Gulf Oil) mounted a negative publicity campaign against hemp in Hearst-owned newspapers, trumping up charges of marijuana use, to illegalize its cultivation.

This paved the way for the world’s largest privately owned timber holdings (forests owned by Hearst) to be harvested for the paper industry, which required petroleum products and chemicals developed by Du Pont.

Benefits of Hemp

Hemp is anti-microbial and highly resistant to insects. It NEVER requires the use of herbicides, pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

Hemp, unlike cotton, does not deplete the soil of nutrients. This makes it cheaper to produce, eliminates groundwater pollution due to pesticide run-off, and curtails farming community exposure to toxic and cancer-causing products.

What This Means

In the USA approximately 1.4 billion cotton t-shirts are sold annually. If they were replaced by hemp t-shirts the energy savings would be 3486 million GJ (that’s the household power for one whole year for 92,300 people) and the water savings would be 1339 BILLION gallons (that would satisfy the household water consumption for more than half the population of the USA for ONE YEAR).

Why You Should Wear It

Rawganique.com
Products made from European hemp that’s organically grown without chemicals or pesticides of any kind.

LaLaNatural.com
Variety of Hemp Kitchen and Bath products, also great for baby clothing and nappies.

DashHemp.com
Organic hemp clothing for men and women, including lounge and yoga wear.

HemperJeans
High quality, super soft and sexy hemp jeans for men and women.

Hemp Facts

Hemp fabric is nature’s most durable natural fiber. It is four times more durable than cotton, and is naturally UV resistant, offering more protection than other natural fibers.

Henry Ford experimented with hemp to build car bodies. He wanted to build and fuel cars from farm products.

BMW is experimenting with hemp materials in automobiles as part of an effort to make cars more recyclable.

Much of the bird seed sold in the US has hemp seed (it’s sterilized before importation), the hulls of which contain about 25% protein.

Hemp oil once greased machines. Most paints, resins, shellacs, and varnishes used to be made out of linseed (from flax) and hemp oils.

Rudolph Diesel designed his engine to run on hemp oil.

Kimberly Clark has a mill in France which produces hemp paper preferred for bibles because it lasts a very long time and doesn’t yellow.

Construction products such as medium density fiber board, oriented strand board, and even beams, studs and posts could be made out of hemp. Because of hemp’s long fibers, the products will be stronger and/or lighter than those made from wood.

Over 25,000 different products can be made from hemp