Our New Material Option *LINK*

Heheh...

John in NM

Down here we get to drive through the occasional Border Patrol checkpoint - I wonder if their dogs would signal on the scraps That would make for an eventful trip home from the lumber yard!

There is always someone working on alternatives

Dick Coers

And that is a good thing, but it's extremely hard to break into the big markets. There was a Canadian company that made wheat straw board a couple decades ago. Wonderful smell cutting the wheat straw. Also a company that makes rice straw board. I think I remember another company trying out corn stalks since that has a lot of fiber in it. There was also a small company making a product called Environ. It was a died newspaper product. Even heavier than OSB, but really had some beautiful colors. I still have partial sheets of the Environ in purple/black, black/white, and green/black. All these products get their raw materials in a single year, not 25+ years for small plantation trees.

Re: There is always someone working on alternative

Barry Irby

When I was in college at VA Tech, one of the professors was working on Sycamore Silage. The idea was to divide the median strip of the interstate in five strips about eight feet wide and plant thousands of sycamores in each strip on one year intervals. So that they were staggered in age. Then, at year five, harvest the oldest strip with something like a silage chopper. They would sprout back from the stumps even thicker.

The idea was to make OSB and other products out of the clippings AND they would form a barrier that would be seriously difficult for a car to penetrate and yet would stop the car with little damage and impact. Each year you would harvest a different row.

I have pines growing and the goal used to be to thin them at 20 years and perhaps harvest them for poles at 30 or let them go to forty and harvest for timber. My timber guy tels me that now the only timber they are interested in are ones that will make 2x6's so you might as well harvest them at fifteen or twenty for OSB

Side benefits

Ellis Walentine

I've been interested in strategies for taking CO₂ out of the air. The usual answer is to plant trees (and not to cut down ones that are already there); but, in terms of practicality, at the rate we're spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we don't really have enough time to wait 50 or 100 years for a forest to grow to maturity. Hemp, on the other hand, is one of the fastest growing and effective CO₂ mitigators out there -- far better than even mature forests -- and it grows to full height in just a couple months. If we would just plant hemp in the billions of acres of arable land out there, we'd not only get a better handle on carbon, but we could revitalize the whole hemp industry, which used to be a premier raw material for rope, paper, fabric and other products.

Seems like a no brainer to me.

Ellis

Re: Side benefits

William Duffield

Why do you think they made it illegal in the first place? It was pressure from the rope and cloth industries that didn't want the competition. How's that for a conspiracy theory?

Re: Side benefits

John in NM

Same here, seems like a real easy win-win.... as good as bamboo but native and grows like crazy as I understand.

Re: There is always someone working on alternative

al morgan

B/W but "red" all over?

Re: Our New Material Option *LINK*

Jim Dillon

Ah yes, hemp.

My wife and I lost a bundle in the mid '90s by investing in a local micro-brewery that, allegedly, was the first in the US to brew beer from hemp (seeds). Long story short, we lost our shirts after the feds stepped in to take a closer look at what the brewery was doing (and advertising). Legend has it that the brew was served on Air Force One!! Since then, I've stayed away from any hemp-related products, including wood substitutes. Just saying... . Jim

Here is a link to the brewery Wikipedia page. If your interested, scroll to the bottom to see a brief discussion on hemp-brewed beer.


Hemp brewed beer