Hemp-based Building Materials for Storage of Carbon in Built Environment

Recent advances in the production of industrial hemp represent a significant opportunity for the development of rapidly-renewable, bio-based composite materials enabling the decrease in carbon emissions and energy consumption in both the construction and operation of buildings. Industrial hemp is a multi-purpose crop that requires minimal herbicide or pesticides as well as irrigation. It is also ideal for carbon sequestration as it absorbs more carbon dioxide (CO2) per hectare than any forest or commercial crop during plantation growth, making it one of the most sustainable crops available. Alternative building materials that employ fibers and hurds obtained from this low input and potentially carbon-negative crop offer substantial climate benefits.

Given hemp’s environmental advantages and the suitability of Virginia’s climate for hemp production and the state’s active efforts to find crops to replace tobacco, there is an opportunity for hemp to become a locally-sourced, rapidly-renewable, sustainable building material for construction applications across the state. This project seeks to advance scholarship in hemp-based construction by developing and piloting structural applications for this material. The project brings together a multidisciplinary team of three scholars to leverage and synthesize well-established elements of civil engineering, lifecycle analysis, composite mechanics, and construction. The team will design, fabricate, and test hemp-based composite constructs which support mechanical loads, mitigate noise and damping, and provide insulation. The team will conduct concurrent techno-economic assessment (TEA) to estimate key environmental and economic performance metrics such as cost (in $/tonne) and life-cycle global warming potential (in kg CO2-equivalent/tonne). We will estimate how much commercial hemp-based construction materials can be
produced per year in Virginia and what corresponding amounts of atmosphere CO2 can be sequestered.