Tag: Hemp Paper

Hemp Paper in the USA: Part 2

Written by Mina Hegaard on September 24, 2021. Posted in Agriculture, Innovation & Hemp Technologies.

Ken Gibson

Hemp has been used for paper for some 2,000 years, the use of wood pulp is a new concept that has been causing economic and environmental chaos.

At the time of this writing paper in the US is shipped in from southeast Asia, incurring transport costs and adding to the loss of forests. A hemp paper industry in America would provide jobs and lessen the damage to the environment; it would also produce stronger paper, as the hemp papers, being long, interlock and form a more lasting paper.

In my previous article I noted that “cellulose is the most abundant molecule in agriculture”; indeed, it is the basis of our entire economy. It is both the cheapest substance and the most expensive, if one tallies the price of just one fraction of a gram that brought in over $9million at Sothebys. Of course, that was a rare example of a purchase – the 1c Magenta postage stamp from British Guyana, which has passed hands from a boy to a nobleman to a murderer.

But most cellulose products do not have such an illustrious history. They simply go from the farm to the factory to the distributor to the store to the consumer to the rubbish bin.

But in the course of this, livelihoods are made. Jobs are created, and we use pieces of cellulose to transact all of this. We call these pieces money. Some are wont to quote that it does not grow on trees. Ironically, it does. Or at least it is made from trees.

Or most of it is. The US uses about 6% hemp in the greenback, as this plant produces not only a long strand, but the strands fibrillate better than that of other plants, thus creating a more integrated.

Thus our money comes from trees, and in the best-case scenario, trees take seven years to mature. Bowater used to have much of the southeast US covered in pines for this purpose.

Now the trees are grown in southeast Asia, and Americans do not produce their own paper. Each person uses about 200 lbs. The nations needs thus 35 million tons of paper each year.

Which could come from farms in the heartland. And it could be produced once again in America.

This very subject was given thought even before the present crisis and state of dependency on foreign supplies. Government record from 1910-1916 shows

a number of trials conducted by the USDA on paper production which included a study of hurds as a raw material – hurds are 35-70% cellulose, whereas the bast is 70-77% cellulose.

Usually hurds are left to rot as farm waste, but if put to use, with thousands of pounds per acre produced in a season, the economic reality is not hard to see.

The US needs to secure not only paper supplies but water – and that is another reason for growing hemp. Hemp grown for paper not only can reduce the dependency on trees, but also water use in areas where crops such as cotton are grown. The USDA estimates that 9,461,000 acres of cotton were harvested in the US in 2011—a year in which more than one-third of the nation’s crop was wiped out by severe drought, with farmers in Texas and Oklahoma forced to abandon more than 5 million acres, more than half of what they planted.

I will leave the reader with those statistics and ask that they do the math, while contemplating that same acreage under cultivation for paper. The hemp uses less water and less pesticides. It can be used to create an entire industry, about which we will be studying more of in my next installment.

HEMP PAPER In Demand for more products and textiles.

Written by Mina Hegaard on July 16, 2021. Posted in Cultivation.

The majority of the hemp plants are in the stems. Thus a farmer has interest in making the most of this part.

Those growing for medicinal use and CBD oils can turn a profit from the leaves and buds, while hemp oil and hemp seeds per se are proving to be a lucrative market.

For some, what remains is simply left as compost. Which returns back to the soil little

more than carbohydrates. Little nitrogen or other elements of use are given back. The many tons of biomass, in the form of carbohydrates, especially cellulose, are of commercial value.

From charcoal to fine textiles, simple compounds with only carbon, hydrogen and oxygen are raw materials in demand. Cellulose is the most abundant molecule in agriculture, and the most common molecule in products used by man. Paper, lumber, most of our clothing, cardboard, cordage, insulation. We live in and use cellulose. We eat it.

We pay for it. Usually, not much, but in the case of fine threads, some pay thousands for a get up.

Hemp has had its place in the best of textiles, back when the Piedmont region of Italy produced hemp threads as fine as silk.But today most hemp threads are a bit coarse, and the market is dominated by PR China, which both grows hemp and spins it. For the Western farmer there is hope on the horizon that his crop will end up on the catwalk, but more research and development is needed.

However, paper mills are looking for hemp.

In 2000 I hooked up with British environmentalist John Hanson, who had his own paper, with a large hemp leaf watermark. I ordered three tons. He had French grown hemp pulped in Spain and then sent to Scotland for the final operation. I waited with bated breath for the lorry (Brit for truck) to round the bend into my storage locker in Hammer-smith with my stash.

For the three tons of paper I traded an ounce of paper, bearing, of course, the image of Her Majesty and its own watermark; which was not a hemp leaf. However, the paper I traded for the pallets of John Hanson TreeFree (copyright) did use hemp. Many a government, including that of the United States, uses hemp in its currency.

The reason is that hemp is a more interlocking fiber than even flax. Wood does not really even have a fiber. Thus hemp provides a strong basis for other fibers to connect with and form a sheet of matted fibers.

For 2,000 years man has been using this. Americans use on average 200 lbs. per person. And most of this, almost all – is made in Southeast Asia. From wood. American paper used to be made from hemp, flax, and recycled rags. America used to lead the world in the production of paper. Now there are few mills here, most with a production of under 10,000 tons per year. Some of those are specialty mills. Very few use hemp.

Some use farm waste, a practice championed by Woody Harrelson, who encouraged the use of wheat stems in paper making. His move was good both ecologically and economically. And it was good for farmers, adding value to their harvest of food crops.

With his action, he was sowing a seed for the revival of the US paper industry. A paper industry in the US not only provides jobs, but is good for the ecology if farm wastes along with hemp bast are used. Add to that the value of recycling our rags and the argument is made.

Hemp – and other plants, can be dual crops as we revive the paper industry in the US.

Tune in next issue for a more specific discussion of this subject.

HEMP OIL: A MAIN INGREDIENT IN THE HEMP BUSINESS

Written by texashempreporter on May 10, 2021. Posted in CBD News & Business.

The hemp industry in the United States, after years of lobbying, is back in business. While not all states have yet made it legal, the federal government has, with much help from former Congressman Rand Paul in Texas and his son Ron, a Senator in Kentucky.

The time that I spent writing “Hemp for Victory: History and Qualities of the World’s Most Useful Plant” was not in vain, but there is still much to be done.

Cultivation of Cannabis sativa in the US is mainly for THC and CBD oils. The former acronym needs no introduction, while the latter is still rather new to some people. In New York, the latter was a grey area for the law, and when it was illegal to sell, one could see vendors openly proclaiming the wonders of CBD oils. The scene reminded me of snake oil salesmen. Some used very little CBD in their product, but put high prices on what was often olive oil with a few drops of CBD.

No one knew if it cured viruses or caused hallucinations. No one knew whether to make an arrest or make a sale. But dealers knew CBD was a good sound byte that resulted in profits.

While much money has been made from, and much legislation has been enacted regarding THC and CBD, I feel no need to enter at large upon that field but rather to give some insights about the more industrial products.

Rope, textiles, paper, are among the many items that use hemp as their raw material. The outer part of the stem, the hurd, is removed by processes known as retting, while the inner part, which constitutes about 25-30% of the stalk, known as bast, is what is primarily used. Both are mainly composed of cellulose.

For the bast to be processed into rope, textiles and paper, there must be infrastructure in place. Presently, this is not the case to any great degree. Factories have long since closed. Paper, which is the simplest to produce, is made mostly in Asia, with only a few small mills in existence in the US.

In some small mills, hemp is used for specialty papers which command a premium. In the UK, I had made 3 tons of this, and I was mobbed by hempsters asking me to sell. Most was used for the aforementioned book. Since, I have found very little that I could buy.

At times, campaigners have tried to get factories to use hemp, but they lacked the experience and patience to succeed. Revamping infrastructure may take government assistance, which I encourage, as jobs would be created from the hemp industry.

While we await change, there are ways that a farmer can sell their product, one of which includes selling stalks for simple uses such as pyrolysis and insulation.

A much more lucrative market is that of the seed for oil, or, better yet, the sale of the oil pressed on the farm by the grower. In the UK I saw small local distributers as well as national brands, such as Mother Hemp, Nutiva and Viridian, and an international brand, Good Oil.

The last brand attracted my ire, as I learned that a chemical defoliant was used to wilt the leaves so as to separate the seeds. Good Oil was on the shelves at Whole Foods in 2011, but after I wrote about the chemical defoliant, it ceased to be stacked.

In dry climates, leaves shrivel more easily. In humid climates, they stay on longer and there is more possibility of mold damage, for which reason farmers use large screens, drying them in spread out layers.

Hemp seeds (technically ‘achenes’) contain 30-35% oil, which commands a high price. I wrote about it on my site (hempforvictory.blogspot.com) in 2006:

“Hemp oil is considered to be one of nature’s healthiest oils. It is known to contain therapeutic compounds, and for this reason is used both in medicine and in cosmetics. It has a high antioxidant quality and contains linoleic acids. These acids, along with eicosanoids, tocopherols, tocotrienols, Omega 3,6,&9 EFAs and all eight essential amino acids, make hemp oil a top item in health food shops.”

The majority of buyers of hemp oil are urban dwellers; in New York City, it sells well at Whole Foods and other natural food stores.

There is another contingent of buyers of hemp oil: artists. Since hemp oil was used in for centuries as a drying oil, along with linseed, poppy and walnut oils, there is a demand, though limited. I use it, and have over the years made experiments to see how clearly it dries, comparing it to linseed, walnut and poppy oils.

From these I note variation, with the clearest being that of the Ukranian brand Golden Kings.

As hemp lends itself to genetic variation – a fact noted by no less than the great geneticist Ivan Vavilov – this is was to be expected.

Clarity is determined by the amount of glycerides of linoleic and linolenic acids, of which linseed oil, which is known to yellow, contains the most. In hemp oil, the content thereof varies according to the variety.

As a clear drying hemp oil would add value, and it is well known that levels of linoleic acid vary with varieties, rainfall and temperature, thus it is possible to improve and refine it specifically for artists’ oil. A 2005 article in the Journal of Industrial Hemp, [Vol. 10, #2, 2005, Bertrand Matthaus et al.], in which over 50 varieties are studied, gives specific analysis of linoleic acid content.

Much as I see a benefit in this niche product, it is obvious that edible oil has a much larger market, and is part of a simpler strategy of growing hemp for a cash crop of oil, with the hemp seed cake sold to cattle or fish farmers, while stalks are sold to whichever market is in place to use them.

The hemp industry is an emerging, or rather, re-emerging one, which needs people with experience, rather than just political zeal, to guide it.

With such persons at the helm, taking on board the present limitations and working to increase public awareness along with manufacturing infrastructure, hemp farming will be one of the most profitable sectors in American agriculture.