Centuries ago, governments not only allowed hemp cultivation, they encouraged it: The plant produced fiber useful for cordage and cloth essential to ship-building.
Ropes and fabric still are made from the fibrous plant, but now the material also has been repurposed for 21st-century needs, replacing plastic and metal elements in car components.
And supercapacitors — energy storage elements in electronics — can be made from the bark. Some researchers attest that it’s on par with or better than graphene, standard in the industry.
It’s now famous for being mixed with lime to yield a composite used in building materials, known popularly as hempcrete. Other products include insulation and particle board made from hemp.
Health food stores sell packaged hemp seeds for high-protein snacks, hemp juice and milk. The oil is made into beauty products.
This variant of Cannabis sativa is cultivated to have lower levels of THC, the part of the plant that makes marijuana-smokers high. But it has elevated levels of cannabidiol (CDB) one of the active ingredients in medical marijuana.
The University of Hawaii conducted a two-year study of the plant’s various functions, including field trials as a phytoremediator — a plant that can clean toxins from the soil.
Melody Heidel, a research associate on the study, said it was best among the tested species for uptake of oil in soil while leaving the water, and absorbed 80 percent of the atrazine, a compound found in Hawaii agricultural fields.
“It’s good erosion control, drought-tolerant, pest-resistant,” she added.
