HempWood | a new eco-friendly hardwood | Video

By Belinda Carr

Hey everyone! I’m Belinda Carr, from Dubai, UAE but I now live in Dallas, Texas. I make videos on Building Science, Products & Tech. I try to learn something new every day and convey it in an unbiased manner. Subscribe to my channel to discover more about construction with me!

HempWood eco-friendly hardwood.

Full length fiber hemp stalks arrive from farmers in bales or rolls. The bales are separated and crushed to make them more flexible. Next they are spread evenly on a mesh. The roll of hemp stalks is submerged in a proprietary, all-natural soy-based adhesive. After saturation, the hemp stalks are spread on racks and placed into a dryer to lower the moisture content.

After drying, the stalks are weighed into portions. and compressed under 3,000 tons of pressure into steel molds. These blocks are baked in an oven until the catalyst in the glue is activated, which makes the blocks solid. Hempwood can be turned into lumber, woodturning blanks, 4×8 panels, picture frames, guitars, and furniture like lamps, tables and cabinets.

One of the most popular HempWood products is tongue and groove flooring. The blocks are sliced down to 1/8” thick hemp veneer and then pressed on a ½” plywood. The result is a very stable 5/8” thick engineered tongue and groove flooring in 3 options: unfinished, natural, and bourbon. Hempwood can either be rift sawn, which has a vertical linear pattern that resembles traditional lumber or plain sawn, which has a more sporadic pattern.

Hempwood must be treated like high quality, solid hardwood floors. Vapor barriers are essential because it is susceptible to moisture. This flooring can be installed on plywood or OSB subfloors with a standard nail gun.

You can also install this as a floating floor as long as you use waterproof wood glue on all four sides. There are so many things to love about this product.

It is an excellent alternative to hardwood because it grows faster, it is denser and harder. Hempwood is a very versatile and durable material that can easily replace furniture grade lumber. Hemp is considered to be an eco-friendly material because it sequesters more carbon than trees do. While hemp stalks are naturally flammable, hempwood flooring is so densely compressed, it has a low, class B fire rating.

It is much more resistant to fire than softwood pine. Most importantly, it is free of formaldehyde and VOCs. Of course, using healthy materials comes at a cost which is why large flooring manufacturers choose cheap alternatives. Hempwood uses PureBond plywood for their flooring, which is 20% more expensive than imported plywood.

They also use a soy based adhesive that costs $.2.60 a pound, compared to phenolic formaldehyde that costs 17 cent a pound. Their unfinished flooring costs $8 per sq ft while the finished versions are $10 per sq ft. A 4×8 sheet of hempwood is $240. Hempwood is susceptible to water and moisture, so it’s a higher maintenance product than vinyl flooring.

Humidity must be in the range of 35-55% at all times in a room. You should never steam mop or wet mop the floor surface. You cannot use wax, oil, soap only hardwood floor cleaners. Also, you must use an oil based stain, not water based because it can cause the hempwood to swell.

It is not a DIY friendly product like other click-lock flooring. You can’t cut this with a box cutter or even an ordinary blade because it is so dense. The company seems to hire very resourceful people if they can’t find a machine, they simply repurpose existing machines, or build it themselves.

They converted old tobacco drying machines into hemp drying ones. They converted a shipping container into a kiln. They built a bioburner that burns all the waste hemp and heats up glycol or antifreeze. This burners feeds the ovens, dryers and kilns, so they are essentially running a zero carbon operation. Also, they sell hemp saw dust to the HempPlastic company.

By Belinda Carr