| There seems to be a conspiracy theory when it comes to hemp: that "big-x" is keeping it down and the reason that use of this "miracle" material has not taken off is because of concerted efforts to stop it from taking off. It is true that in the United States, hemp production was illegal for many years, limiting research and development into its use. It is also true that in many countries, covering populations much larger than that of the United States, hemp production was never made illegal and continued unabated since prehistory. And it is true that in those countries entire industries, arms of research departments, and government agencies exist to study and promote the use of hemp. This leads me to assert that there are two possible reasons why we aren't using hempsteel, hempcrete, and hemplastics: 1. It is not the miracle material that people claim it is and that's why hempsteel is not a thing, or 2. Americans are the only people on the entire planet smart enough and capable enough to productize it and the prohibition on its cultivation has stopped development. It has never been illegal to import finished hemp products into the United States and even prior to the recent relaxations of prohibitions on hemp growing you could buy an endless variety of hemp goods online. So I'm going to go with 1. I've met many non-americas and they seem no smarter or dumber than we are. The article states that "big paper" lobbied to ban hemp because it might do... something? why wouldn't big paper switch to hemp if it was better? they farm trees like farmers farm corn they'd just switch to farming hemp instead of trees like farmers switch to more profitable crops. And any renegade paper manufacturer could have switched to hemp by buying by the container shipload from China and making paper out of it, undercutting (because hemp is, apparently, cheaper and better) the Big-tree big-paper conspirators. But you can buy hemp paper on Amazon today, right now. Hemp paper sucks. Like, really bad. |
>because hemp is, apparently, cheaper and better
Economies of scale might make it more expensive right now, because we're all using cotton. It could be a local maximum.
Also paper production for classical paper has been optimized to great lengths, maybe you'd need similar efforts to get great paper out of hemp. This doesn't mean it's not possible or the material isn't better. Just that you first have to convince everybody to use it. Again this could be a local maximum we're in.
Just look at how much money we're spending on improving batteries for EVs now. We spent 150 years optimizing ICE vehicles. For EVs to get cheaper and better we need a lot of subsidies, from a lot of countries, for a few decades.