HEMP BUILDING DIRECTORY 2022 LEADER PROFILE
Alex Sparrow: Responding to the rapid demand for Hempcrete What is your position at UK Hempcrete and what do you do? I’m the Founder / Managing Director at UK Hempcrete and I ultimately manage operations across our three main departments (Construction, Design and Material Sales) as well as providing specialist consultancy to a range of clients; architects, developers, building contractors, owner-builders and new hempcrete start-ups around the world. I’m also doing a lot of internal development work at the moment as we scale our services to respond to the rapidly spiralling demand for hempcrete in the UK construction industry. As well as all of that, I sit on the board of ASBP (the Alliance for Sustainable Building Products) in London, and Yorspace (a Community Land Trust / Community-led developer in York), so essentially, I’m kept pretty busy!
What most interests you about hemp and hemp building, and why? I think I’ve always been fascinated that a method of building which is so accessible and low-tech can produce such exceptional thermal performance and be better-than-zero-carbon and produce healthy non-toxic interior spaces and be a fully vapour-open building fabric, helping to create healthy homes and preserve the building fabric into the long term.
What was a win for your company in the past year?
Alex Sparrow, Founder/Managing Director at UK Hempcrete.
In the UK and Europe, hempcrete and hemp insulation products are widely accepted by building code authorities as viable high performance building products. Alex Sparrow, Founder/ Managing Director at UK Hempcrete Our biggest win this year has to be the updating of our material supply service. We started on this piece of work in January 2020, and then Covid hit, so the bulk of the work ended up being done by a small staff team on top of their day to day roles, mainly working from home and communicating through zoom instead of having all the benefits of being in the office together. My team did some really exceptional work, including taking over and completing the final stages of the website build, when our web design company let us
down badly. We somehow finally arrived at the point where our new purpose built material sales website went live in August this year at www.naturalbuildingstore. com. With its build-a-quote-online feature, I hope folks will find it much easier to engage with our sales team and get quotes quickly.
What is something about hemp building/construction/processing you didn’t know a year ago? I found out recently that most of the data that’s quoted on levels of carbon sequestration in hemp biomass comes from a very small pool of academic source data from one part of the world. I must say I was surprised to learn this and I very much hope that research is currently being replicated in different regions around the world. If anyone can connect me with any academic institution (anywhere!) that’s published on this important facet of the hemp story, please get in touch! 2022 | Hemp Building Direcctory 75
