Have you ever heard of hempcrete before, or hempcrete homes?
While this building material shows a tremendous amount of promise, it is still not widely used.
There were only 50 hemp houses in the entire United States according to a 2018 article from CNBC.com, and extremely limited data available online about how many hemp houses are standing worldwide.
In Australia for example, there were fewer than two dozen hemp houses across the country according to an October 2021 article from Venture Magazine.
While hemp houses aren’t widely built or well known, the material shows promise for a new style of sustainable, and affordable, home building.
Recently, a Canadian company purchased 1,000 acres of land in Colorado with the goal of showing off the positive aspects of these unique hemp houses, and it’s capturing the attention of everyone from government officials to people who are looking for something different when it comes to versatile and affordable new building materials.
Community of Hemp Houses Being Built Near Colorado Ski Resort
The homes are being built as part of The Colorado Hemp Agro-Industrial Zone (HAIZ), under the banner of Innovative Hemp Technologies, in the town of Hayden in northwest Colorado.
Hayden is located approximately 25 miles from the Steamboat Springs ski resort, the website GlobalHempGroup.com reported.
The development is being built on approximately 1,000 acres of land as part of a plan to show off how hemp can be used to help build affordable housing communities.
The goal is to turn dry land into an oasis of sustainability and affordability.
“The project will leverage the existing water rights and infrastructure to turn ‘dry land’ farming acreage into irrigated land with valuable water rights that can subsequently be used to develop ‘affordable housing’ and high value agricultural crops such as industrial hemp,” the website explained.
“GHG’s vision is to take the hemp grown onsite and convert as much of the conventional building materials used at the project into sustainable, hemp-based building materials for use in the housing development.”
The Benefits of Hempcrete for Home Building
According to the article, 44 acres of affordable homes will be built as part of the project, which will begin with fields of hemp grown on the land itself.
In this case, hempcrete will serve as the building material of choice.
Hempcrete is said to be a “durable, lightweight, sustainable alternative to traditional concrete made from natural hemp plants” according to the Global Hemp Group’s website.
Check out some examples of these futuristic yet traditional building materials and a hemp house being built from the ground up in the pictures below.
Another hempcrete house can be seen below.
This one was built in a wooded area of Asheville, North Carolina in 2010.
The Colorado will also create additional jobs for the city according to local government officials.
As time goes on, the company expects to increase its holdings in the area while developing its hempcrete home community into an eco-friendly oasis for all who choose to partake.
Farming developments are also being planned as part of the project.
I for one absolutely love this idea and think it’s been a long time coming.
For more information, check out the Global Hemp Group’s website here.