Hempitecture, a Ketchum, Idaho-based company, will soon be manufacturing a non-toxic, no-VOC and more sustainable thermal insulation product for residential and commercial buildings. Once complete, Hempitecture’s 33,000 sq. ft. nonwovens plant will be the first hemp insulation designated facility in the U.S.

The idea for Hempitecture came to Mattie Mead, CEO and founder, when he was an undergraduate in architecture and environmental sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges nearly a decade ago.

As a student, Mead became interested in a few challenges that he learned about in the built environment—one of which is that buildings and their operations are responsible for about 40% of our energy consumption and carbon footprint. Therefore, he began looking at ways that plant-based or rapidly renewable resources can be utilized to create more sustainable, environmentally-friendly buildings.

“The business as it was pitched in college is very different than it is today, and I didn’t even know or understand the term nonwovens when I was a student studying architecture,” Mead says. “We worked through a few different building products and concepts, and ultimately, we arrived at a natural fiber-based insulation product.”

Mead and his team learned about a hemp-based thermal insulation product being produced internationally, so they began importing the product and selling it to the U.S. market just before the start of the coronavirus pandemic. “We are already to market today with a comparable product, and after seeing the growth and demand for this product, we realized that we needed to establish a nonwovens facility here in the United States that can utilize an emerging supply chain for industrial hemp fiber and other bast fiber plants and commodities to create more sustainable insulation products.”

Hempitecture has partnered with Dell’Orco and Villani for its opening and blending line, and its high-loft airlay and thermobonding line is being furnished by Technoplants.

“As you can imagine the cost per square foot of insulation is outrageous when you’re importing a voluminous building material,” he says. “Come this fall, we’ll be pulling the lever and transitioning from an imported source to U.S grown and manufactured. We’re really excited about that because we’re supporting the emerging industrial hemp supply chain and the natural fiber supply chain as a whole.”

When Hempitecture begins production this fall, the company will be making some changes to the formulation of its product HempWool, and the process of manufacturing it will be adjusted to meet all U.S. relevant codes and standards. The company has also done extensive research on R&D and understanding which fire retardants are safe, healthy and non-toxic, and Hempitecture will be rolling out a fire-resistant insulation product in 2022/2023.

Benefits of Hemp

According to Mead, the earliest concept of Hempitecture was focused around industrial hemp, but not so much the fiber. Early on the company utilized a bio-composite building material called hemp lime or hempcrete, which uses the inner woody core of the hemp stalk. As the business matured, Hempitecture transitioned from hempcrete/hemp lime to HempWool, its insulation product that uses the bast fiber.

While Mead says there are many other great bast fiber crops out there, one thing that makes industrial hemp so compelling is that it’s a rapidly renewable resource that can be grown in a variety of climate types and in a variety of regions across the U.S. Also, during its three- to four-month cultivation cycle, it offsets about 9.8 tons of CO2 per acre. “It does that more so than any other bast fiber crops while also requiring less inputs than some other fiber producing crops, making it a truly sustainable, rapidly renewable resource,” he explains. “The fiber itself, when grown with the proper genetics and processed properly, also produces a fiber that is very strong. It has a variety of benefits due to its somewhat porous structure. The porous structure of industrial hemp fiber actually in part lends to the insulative capacity of the fiber itself.”

Today, HempWool is the only USDA Certified Biobased insulation product on the market. The product it’s currently selling, and the one it will be producing later this year, is 89.9% bio-based. The other 10% is a polymer binder. “Whereas other insulation companies are using non-biodegradable or abrasive VOC-containing raw materials in their formulation, we’re using plant fiber and we’re using a binder, so it’s a pretty simple formulation: safe to touch, safe to handle and causes no respiratory harm,” Mead says.

On the other hand, lightly touching an insulation product made with fiberglass puts fiber shards in the skin and irritates the mucus membrane, he adds. “HempWool is the epitome of a healthy and sustainable product, and we’re seeing a lot of interest in the insulation industry to move towards more sustainable, healthy products. However, the products from the companies that are the biggest stakeholders for insulation are inherently not healthy and inherently not sustainable, so we really have that at our core.”

Also, while other insulation products come from non-renewable or carbon intensive resources, Hempitecture’s are coming from plant-based resources. “By coming from plant-based resources, we’re supporting rural communities and rural economies, particularly across the Rocky Mountain West where we’re based in our supply chain, and we like to think our benefit transcends the product we’re producing and the home that it’s going into. It is supporting rural economies that really have been overlooked,” Mead says.

Additionally, because the company is using a rapidly renewable carbon-sequestering commodity as the primary raw material for its product, it is showing a net-zero or a carbon negative product. A lifecycle analysis (LCA) from its manufacturing partner indicate that 1sqm of the product offsets about 1kg of carbon dioxide. Another LCA is underway through a partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to factor in a U.S.-based supply chain. “We’ve really worked to think in terms of proximity principle: where are the nearest sources to our facility for industrial hemp fiber? How can we cut out extensive transportation and really just create the most sustainable product?” he adds.

Currently, Hempitecture is primarily a direct-to-consumer business through its website, hempitecture.com, but once its U.S. manufacturing facility is up and running, it intends to utilize distributorships.  “Building materials aren’t the only space Hempitecture intends to play in, there are countless industries that nonwovens can integrate into and we hope to be a part of solving some of the most pressing sustainability challenges in the nonwovens space,” says Mead.

“As a young company in the nonwovens industry, we know that we don’t have all the answers and we know that there’s a lot to learn,” he continues. “We’re open to learning from other companies about their sustainability goals and understand with them how we can incorporate our natural fiber supply chain into their end products to ultimately create more sustainable long-lasting, high-performance products.”