Harder than Oak: HempWood is Local, Sustainable Alternative
HempWood, created in Murray, KY, is a composite hardwood product made of industrial hemp stalks. Photo courtesy of HempWood.
By Sarah Derouin
From dining room tables to new floors, hardwoods like oak, mahogany, or walnut are in high demand. Harvesting these valuable woods takes forethought—it can take multiple generations for an acorn to become an arching giant.
But what if you didn’t have to wait 80+ years for an oak tree to grow large enough to be felled? A new innovation in the emerging hemp industry seeks to replace traditional hardwood with a woody product that grows in just a few months.
Fast growing hemp is a sustainable, almost on-demand crop, and using it for hardwood allows growing trees and thriving forests to remain intact.
Murray, Kentucky-based HempWood, through its parent company, Fibonacci, has created a new hardwood substitute made from hemp. The product is as tough as hardwood, but with a lower environmental impact than traditional wood. Hemp “wood” is crafted from local plants that are prolific growers, and could change the way we source construction materials for our homes and woodworking projects.
Stronger, Faster, and Local
Wood made from non-tree plants is not a new concept—bamboo has long been used in flooring and furniture. After years of working in the wood industry in China, HempWood founder Greg Wilson decided to think beyond bamboo and branch out to the woody hemp plant.
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“The whole idea is to take something that's weak and grows fast, and transform it into a replacement for something that’s strong and grows slow,” Wilson told HempBuildMag. By adding protein-based bonding and other plant-based materials to the hemp to strengthen and bind the fibers, the engineers at HempWood have created a robust hardwood substitute.
In the end, HempWood is 100 times faster to grow and 20% stronger compared to oak wood.
Making tree-free hardwood can be an environmental boon. Hemp is a quick, renewable, and sustainable crop—a harvest takes only four months compared to the 80 year-growth cycle for hardwood trees. Each hemp harvest contains plants that have trapped carbon, cleaned the air, and haven’t required any timber logging (eliminating disruptions of forest ecosystems).
“The sustainability is through the roof,” said Wilson. “We are a carbon negative business—I don't know anyone else in the building industry that can say that.”
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As hardwood prices are rising worldwide, HempWood costs are coming down, Wilson explained. The company has lowered by refining their process and scaling up production. “The spike in lumber prices [over the past year] made us at or below the cost of comparative domestic hardwoods,” and much less that tropical hardwoods like teak or mahogany. At the moment, HempWood can be bought directly from the company, but Wilson notes that retailers will be added in the future.
“We started selling our product in the 4th quarter of 2019,” said Wilson, adding that during the pandemic, they focused on automating their process and updating equipment. This year, HempWood is focusing on launching a flooring retail program at the NWFA 2021 Wood Flooring Expo in July in Orlando, FL.
“We are looking for people to join our factory rep program and retail family,” he said, adding that there’s more information on their website.
Currently, HempWood sources all its hemp from farms within 100 miles of the factory in Kentucky. But Wilson said after almost 4,000 inquiries on franchising, the company is excited to expand.
“We're planning on setting up [a facility] right now in Oregon, one in Pennsylvania, one in Saskatchewan, one in Poland, and we will eventually have one in Montana and Tasmania.” He explained that the wood product industry in other countries allows HempWood to easily integrate new technology into existing facilities.
HempWood is an innovation that shows that growing hemp for industry in building materials can be a valuable new cash crop to farmers around the world.
Michigan-based Sarah Derouin is a geologist and science writer and editor and contributor to the Big Picture Science radio show.
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