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Hemp trends to watch in 2023 and beyond

Hemp, the forgotten billion euro Industry is making a come back, guest post by David Hartigan

 

Hemp and hemp derived products have been a hot topic the last number of years as it comes back into the mainstream with high level Celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg and Olivia Newton-John promoting its benefits.

Hemp trends to watch in 2023 and beyond

But hemp has been around long before the word Celebrity even existed. There are suggestions that the plant was first cultivated as far back as 8000 B.C. and evidence that it was used by the Egyptians for paper, sails and medicine.

Hemp is ingrained in human history with over 25,000 uses and has been relied upon through History for use in textiles, food and fuel. Hemp was such a vital resource that wars have been fought over its supply. At one point in History in the 1600’s Hemp was so valuable that it was regarded as legal tender in the US and you could pay your taxes with hemp in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland.

During WW2 the US Government even ran a Campaign “Hemp For Victory” to encourage farmers to grow hemp for fibre which was used to help with the war effort. Unfortunately shortly after the war ended heavy taxation and political policies resulted in Hemp being classified as a schedule 1 drug in the US and damaged its demand in Europe.

Only in recent years has the Industry been allowed to flourish again with the Farm Bill in 2018 which removed hemp from the Controlled Substances Act. Since then Hemp has been making a comeback in a big way and has huge potential to disrupt a number of sectors: Textiles, Construction, Food and food supplements, Fuel

Textile Industry

With natural resources in short supply and an increasing demand to move away from petroleum based products, the textile Industry is going through a dynamic change as it looks for more sustainable alternatives. This is where hemp has a huge potential to fill the gap in this $900+ billion Industry

Hemp Clothing and Textiles

Hemp unlike cotton does not require vast amounts of water so is much more sustainable and can be used to make a wide range of items such as jeans, T-shirts, socks, hoodies, towels etc. Hemp fabric is extremely durable as it is highly absorbent, lightweight and three times stronger than cotton. Already big brands like Patagonia have been using hemp fabrics in its clothing lines for nearly a decade and this trend is only set to increase.

Construction

Like all sectors the Construction Sector is really feeling the squeeze due to the rising cost of materials combined with supply issues. Not to mention a push from Governments to use more sustainable building materials to reduce their carbon footprint. Fortunately hemp may hold the solution to some of these problems as it can be used to create strong, durable, ecological building materials.

One of the most exciting uses of hemp is as a replacement for petroleum-based materials in new builds and retrofits. One example of this is Hempcrete, a product made from a mixture of hemp hurds (shives) and lime, sand, or pozzolans, which is used as a material for construction and insulation.With the global insulation market valued at over $64.9 Billion Hemp certainly has a promising future. Hempcrete is non toxic, fully biodegradable and has great insulation properties making it a superior building material.

Insulation

As an insulation hemp works wonders as it absorbs heat during the day and stores it in the thermal mass of the wall which is then slowly released. This ensures it keeps your house cool during the day and warm at night.

Non-Hazardous and Non-Toxic

Hemp is extremely safe to work with as it is non-toxic and non-hazardous. This makes it a much safer material to work with compared to the likes of fibreglass or other petrochemical materials which are linked to adverse side effects.

Fully Recyclable, Natural Fire Resistant & pest resistant

As hempcrete is bio based it is fully recyclable meaning it won’t end up in a landfill making it even more eco friendly. Not only that it is known for being fireproof and pest resistant.

Food and food supplements

Hemp is a fantastic source of food for both humans and animals due to it being nutritionally dense. Hemp is a great source of protein and rich in omega 3 & 6 and Vitamin E. It also has high levels of magnesium, zinc, iron and calcium which are essential for a healthy heart. Hemp seeds are consumed widely across the World and companies are looking at how hemp can be used to make meat free burgers and even cow milk substitutes.

In terms of a feed for animals hemp is already widely used due to its high protein content and relatively low cost. The other benefit of using hemp as an animal feed is that it can be produced locally avoiding the need to import the likes of soya which is mainly produced in Asia helping to reduce unnecessary food miles.

In the food supplement sector Hemp is already thriving with the likes of CBD products sold widely across Europe. Hemp supplements are being used to help with everything from sleep issues, to pain and anxiety. Already experts are saying the CBD market could be worth $20 billion by 2024 as more people look for natural alternatives and lean away from pharmaceuticals

Fuel

As the demand for energy increases and the energy crisis facing Europe worsens there is a pressing need to diversify away from traditional sources such as oil. The good news is that hemp seeds can be used to make a very reliable biodiesel.

Hemp has a high fuel yield and a short growth cycle making it an ideal rotational crop and it takes more Co2 out of the atmosphere than trees. Biodiesel made from the plant already meets clean air regulations and it is more environmentally friendly compared to other biofuel crops such as soya.

Hemp may also hold the key to the future of battery technology as a group of American and Canadian researchers found that the hemp bast fibres can be recycled into supercapacitors. The hemp fibres can be processed into carbon nanosheets, which are similar to graphene which is widely used in batteries. Compared to graphene, hemp is less expensive and works just as well for energy storage. 

David Hartigan is a former PwC Business Consultant and Smurfit graduate who got involved in the hemp industry back in 2017. He is one of the leading experts in Europe on Hemp & CBD and currently sits on the board for the Hemp Cooperative Ireland specialising in regulation and compliance. Currently he is working with a number of TD’s and government departments to ensure more support is provided to the emerging hemp industry in Ireland.

SIMON COCKING

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From Globalization To A Planetary Mindset

It’s time for new cooperative platforms that address irreducible interdependence.

Globalization as we have known it is over. Kaput. As John Gray summarily puts it in his contribution to Noema, “forget it.” For the British philosopher, we are returning to the pluralism that existed before the post-Cold War neoliberal expansion and even the recent centuries of Western hegemony. This is the fragmentation that Chinese thinker Yuk Hui also talks about in Noema. For him, that means any new order will arise at multiple starting points, or bifurcations, that depart from the course we were on.

There will be many possible permutations, from Cold War and economic decoupling between the two great powers, protectionist trade policies and immigration curbs. We will see a patchwork of industrial policies aimed at strengthening national resilience instead of global integration. So-called “robust” supply chains that are partly global and partly domestic to build in redundancy as a hedge against political or natural disruptions are already appearing. While the populist revolt dealt the death blow to globalization, alternative political dispositions waiting in the wings have also so far shown little interest in resuscitating it.

What remains, and is irreducible, is the planetary. Obviously, the global ecosystem, including climate and pandemics that cross borders, qualify as planetary. The challenges here are recognized as common and convergent for all.

Thus, reconciling the centrifugal pull of ingathering with the centripetal imperative of planetary cooperation is the so-called “primary contradiction” going forward.

This contradiction will play out across a global communications web that has spun a synchronized planetary consciousness in which all are aware of what everyone else is doing, or not doing, in more or less real time. Inexorably, a kind of global mind, or “noosphere” as Teilhard de Chardin envisioned it, is emerging. But it is today as much a terrain of contestation rooted in divergent political and cultural tempers, including an ever more differentiating splinternet, as a space of common ground.  

The “noopolitik” of the coming era could not be more different than the realpolitik of the last century. Rather than solid nation-states in which elites calculate balances of power, noopolitik is a transparent endeavor open to all manner of connected players in a now gaseous global realm in which nations are attempting to reclaim sovereignty even as the solidity they once assumed diminishes with every passing day.

The ultimate project of a planetary approach, therefore, is to forge a shared narrative for the noosphere. This doesn’t imply some one-size-fits-all Leviathan-like order that sets solutions to whatever ails the world, but a prevalent normative awareness that a cooperative approach is the only way to make irreducible interdependence work for each of us instead of against all of us.

That shared consciousness, or “noorative,” will only take hold in the first instance if its foundation rests not on wooly abstractions but on the existential imperative of cooperation in such clear and present realities as climate and pandemics. In effect, this noorative would combine the Chinese strategist Zheng Bijian’s idea of “building on a convergence of interests to establish a community of interests” with the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of “planetary co-immunism,” as he explains in an interview with Noema.

This new order of cooperation, and the evolved consciousness that arises out of its concrete actions, can only be built one brick at a time through new planetary platforms. A “partnership of rivals” among nation-states and the “civilization-states” that are in conflict in some realms, but nonetheless have cross interests in others, is one such way. It can also be built through “networks of the willing” among both civil society and states so disposed. In other words, alternative, parallel practices and institutions will have to be built on another foundation than a U.N.-style “trade union for nations-states” in order to ultimately go beyond the lessening but still weighty pull of their inertia.

One example of this approach was embodied in the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council presentation to former Mexican President Felipe Calderón when he hosted the G20 in 2012 — the first time that supranational body tackled climate change. We proposed that while G20 summitry could set broad goals, it lacked the legitimacy to implement them across different jurisdictions. To that end we recommended that “a web of national and subnational networks should be fostered to provide global public goods, such as low-carbon growth, from below through ‘coalitions of the willing’ working together to build up a threshold of global change.”

Only once the trust- and legitimacy-building experience of new platforms that address climate and pandemics gain traction can that cooperative spirit meaningfully address other imminent planetary challenges — bioengineering, AI and the creation of inorganic life.

The time has arrived to stop regretting the lost illusions of globalization and start thinking of how to construct a new order grounded in the undeniable realities of interdependence.