Idaho Business Tackles the Greenification of Building

Ketchum-based Hempitecture prepares to open a new facility in Jerome to manufacture HempWool, a green alternative to insulation for residential and commercial buildings.

BY MICAH DREW

One of the most popular hiking spots outside of Sun Valley, made even more popular by its Instagram-ability, is the Pioneer Cabin, a ski hut built by the Union Paci c Railroad in 1937 perched at 9,400 feet emblazoned with its iconic rooftop message “THE HIGHER YOU GET, THE HIGHER YOU GET.” What isn’t seen on social media posts, however, is tucked just inside the cabin’s frame: a series of insulation panels made from hemp, courtesy of Ketchum-based startup Hempitecture.

The insulation isn’t the traditionally seen bright pink- fiberglass that requires gloves and a mask to handle. Instead, the insulation for the cabin is mottled brown—the color of dried plant fibers… which is exactly what it is.

Hempitecture’s partnership with community members working to restore the Forest Service building in 2020 was a small, but meaningful demonstration of the use of hemp-based insulation, dubbed HempWool, which Hempitecture manufactures in Canada and distributes in the U.S. HempWool is the latest in a series of green, carbon-neutral building products that have grown in popularity over the years.

Three years after hiking insulation up to that tiny cabin, the company is set to begin manufacturing HempWool stateside in a new 33,000 square foot facility outside Jerome, the first hemp-insulation facility in the U.S., which started production in February.

“We are thrilled to celebrate this monumental milestone that symbolizes the immense amount of work put into the brand’s facility from concept to completion,” said Hempitecture Founder and CEO Mattie Mead in a press release about the facility’s ribbon cutting. “ is truly marks the beginning of a new chapter for the industrial hemp industry—not just in Idaho, but in the United States as a whole, given this new outlet for using industrial help and raw materials for high-performance, sustainable product alternatives. We are also just so proud to be a contributor to the agricultural growth here in Idaho and the West Rocky Mountains.”

Hempitecture operates in a growing sector focused on the greenification of the building industry. The company works on the development, manufacturing, and distribution of non-woven materials, specifically hemp-based building materials, from building blocks known as hempcrete, thermal insulation (HempWool), and acoustic insulation (AcoustiBatts).

“The idea of why you would want hemp-based building products is the much better environmental footprint these products have than their conventional substitutes,” Hempitecture Co-Founder Tommy Gibbons said. “When you look at products like insulation, like vinyl siding or flooring, sheet rock, a lot of these are either petroleum or mineral based products that were designed and commercialized without any regard to their environmental impact. Now that we’ve had this big green awakening it’s time to redesign the building industry and rebuild it with products that consider their environmental impact.”

Hemp plants capture and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then sequesters the CO2 in the hemp fibers. at CO2 is then locked in when the hemp is turned into a variety of building material, counteracting the carbon footprint of traditional products like concrete, which accounts for roughly 8% of CO2 emissions annually.

Thee first product Hempitecture focused on was “hempcrete,” a composite of hemp fiber and limestone used as building blocks in construction. One of the first projects Meade and Gibbons worked on together was the Highland Hemp House, a renovation project in Bellingham, Washington, that utilized hempcrete and provided a learning environment for the fledgling company while demonstrating that hemp-based construction is possible on a large scale.

“Even though we wanted to create a company around these building products, we actually had to build standing testaments to this material to this industry,” Gibbons said.

While Hempitecture still produces hempcrete, the company has pivoted its focus to HempWool, where they are on the leading edge of the domestic market. Across the board however, Gibbons said that the U.S. market for hemp-based building lags behind other nations.

“We were very much pioneers in the U.S. and people thought we were crazy,” Gibbons said. “But America really has this problem with embodied carbon and I saw what was going on with the need to greenify across the industries.”

Part of the reason behind the lag is the strict regulation of hemp products in America over the years. Until 2018, hemp and hemp seeds were on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s schedule of controlled substances, due to the plant also being cultivated for CBD and THC. It was only in 2021 that Idaho legalized the production and cultivation of hemp through H.B. 126, the last state in the U.S. to do so. Following the signing of the bill by Governor Brad Little in April of 2021, Hempitecture received the state’s first industrial hemp license.

That paved the way for Hempitecture to begin planning to produce its signature HempWool in Idaho.

HempWool is a direct one-to-one substitute for traditional insulation products but has the benefits of being non-toxic, a carbon sink, and 90% bio-based (the other 10% is a binding agent). It’s particularly attractive as an alternative to fiberglass insulation, which presents a danger to exposed skin, the eyes, and lungs. Insulation for homes and commercial buildings is a nearly $12 billion market in the U.S. alone, giving HempWool a lot of room to grow.

The interest in greener building products has provided Hempitecture with a lot of funding and attention in recent months. Gibbons was awarded an Innovation Crossroads fellowship through the Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Research Integration Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to study the decarbonization potential of hemp-based building products. In addition, the Idaho Global Entrepreneurial Mission awarded Hempitecture and the University of Idaho a $200,000 grant for research and development on HempWool. It also wasn’t long ago that Forbes named Meade and Gibbons to their 2020 30 Under 30 list for young entrepreneurs to watch.

To help bring the new facility to Jerome, Hempitecture launched an investment round last summer that Gibbons said “took off like a rocket.” The company pulled in nearly $4.7 million in a single funding round last spring, which directly went towards bringing the manufacturing facility online.

Over the summer, production equipment arrived from Italy and with the assembly plant online, the company will begin putting its extensive research to use with some changes to products’ formulation and plans to roll out new products, including re-resistant insulation.

We’re really at an influx point with our company, this manufacturing plant is only the first step toward our future.

“We’ve got our supply chain partners lined up, we’ve got distribution partners lined up, so we’re ready to get this material into more projects across the United States,” Gibbons said. “We’re really at an influx point with our company, this manufacturing plant is only the first step toward our future.”