Hempcrete: The green brick taking on the challenge of climate change
The BRIGHT building at University of Bradford, UK. Photo courtesy of UK Hempcrete
By Garfield Myrie
Hempcrete is a bio-based building material helping to power the drive to net-zero, but how can a product developed a millennia ago help tackle today's environmental challenges? Euronews Culture gets down and dirty with a material that has Europe’s eco-conscious architects high with excitement.
It really doesn’t look like much, but hempcrete is the green building material that’s got eco-savvy homeowners and architects excited by its potential to be a sustainable alternative to environmentally expensive bricks and concrete.
It is made using a carefully calibrated mixture of hemp shiv – the dried inner core of the hemp plant – mixed with lime and water.
But although hempcrete seems like a very modern building material, it has a history stretching back over 1,500 years.
Hemp plaster from the sixth century still lines the walls of the UNESCO-designated Ellora Caves in India, and hemp mortar has been discovered in ancient Merovingian bridge abutments in France – which is fitting, as France was at the forefront of the 1980s drive to modernise hempcrete and introduce it to a new generation.