INDUSTRY Trends By David Koenig
EHP
Photo by HempWood
Is it high time for Engineered Hemp Products?
T
he continuing volatility in wood prices may finally be creating an opening for a new generation of engineered lumber products that aren’t lumber at all; they use hemp in place of wood fiber.
COUNTERS, SHELVING, cabinetry—you name it, hemp-based particleboard reportedly can be used in all MDF applications. (Photo by CannaGrove)
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For more than 30 years, manufacturers have been trying to turn hemp and other agrifiber composites into substitutes for wood boards and panels. The most successful results have used wheat straw, but there have also been attempts that employed rice straw, grass straw, cotton stalks, soybean stalks, kenaf and hemp. The plants are all plentiful, adaptable and lightning-fast to grow. Hemp, for instance, can grow from seed to harvest in three to four months. In fact, hemp—the non-psychoactive form of the cannabis plant—is a natural as a building material. It has been used for thousand of years for rope and continues to rise in popularity in insulation (either as pressed coreboard or hemp wool) and as a concrete substitute (called hempcrete). Traditionally, the biggest limitations have been legality (a problem solved with an amendment to the U.S. Farm bill in 2018) and cost (hemp insulation and hempcrete can cost more than the products they replace by 50% or more). Recent wood price spikes, however, have made hemp-based lumber substitutes considerably less expensive. Typically, the substitutes are produced in ways reminiscent of the production of traditional engineered wood prod-
n Building Products Digest n April 2022
ucts, including MDF, OSB, I-joists and LVL. The first of them came in the early 1990s, when C&S Specialty Builders Supply, Harrisburg, Or., imported regulated bales of hemp to develop its own MDF, with an assist from researchers at Washington State University Wood Materials & Engineering Laboratory. They claimed their product proved to be two-and-a-half times stronger than MDF composites. In 2018, CannaGrove, a division of Hemp Traders, Paramount, Ca., introduced CannaBoard particleboard, which incorporates hemp fibers and a non-toxic, formaldehyde-free resin as a binder. It reportedly can be used in place of all MDF applications, from furniture to subflooring. The company partnered with a manufacturing facility in Idaho to produce limited quantities and was about to go to wide production in 2000. Then the pandemic—and resulting boom in demand for construction products—forced the plant to focus all of its capacity and resources on its core products, leaving CannaGrove without a production partner. CannaGrove is hopeful it will find a new facility and resume production in the second half of 2022. In 2019, Fibonacci, Murray, Ky., Building-Products.com
