The world’s tallest skyscraper built of industrial hemp will soon open its doors in South Africa, with 12 stories, a stunning view of the towering Table Mountain in Cape Town, and a small ecological footprint.
The 54-room Hemp Hotel is receiving finishing touches in central Cape Town and is scheduled to be finished in June.
The building’s walls are made of “hempcrete” blocks made from cannabis plant material, which are held up by a framework made of cement and concrete.
Increasingly more people are using hemp bricks in construction projects because of its insulating, fire-resistant, and environmentally friendly qualities.
The blocks, which are primarily used in Europe for thermal repair of old buildings, are carbon negative, which means that making them removes more glasshouse gases from the atmosphere than it adds.
“The plant absorbs the carbon, it gets put into a block and is then stored into a building for 50 years or longer,” explains Boshoff Muller, director of Afrimat Hemp, a subsidiary of South African construction group Afrimat, which produced the bricks for the hotel.
“What you see here is a whole bag full of carbon, quite literally,” Muller says as he pats a bag of mulch at a brick factory on the outskirts of Cape Town, where hemp hurds, water and lime are mixed together to make the blocks.
Since South Africa had previously forbade domestic production of industrial hemp until last year, when the government began issuing cultivation permits, the industrial hemp used for the Hemp Hotel had to be imported from Britain.
According to President Cyril Ramaphosa, growing the hemp and cannabis industry in the nation should be a top economic goal because it may lead to the creation of more than 130,000 employment.
- Carbon credits
The first blocks constructed exclusively from South African hemp will soon be produced by Afrimat Hemp.
The 52-year-old architect of the Hemp Hotel believes that this will revolutionize the construction of hemp structures in this region of the world.
“It shouldn’t be just a high-end product,” says Wolf, whose firm is involved in several social housing projects in South Africa and neighbouring Mozambique.
Yet cost remains an issue.
“Hemp is 20 percent more expensive to build with” compared to conventional materials, says Afrimat Hemp’s carbon consultant Wihan Bekker.
However, Bekker claims that as nations race to reduce carbon emissions, the company sees “huge opportunities” for its green bricks.
Hempcrete blocks may become more financially feasible with the use of carbon credits, which are permits typically associated with the planting of trees to protect tropical rainforests and which businesses purchase to offset their emissions.
“We can fund forests, or we can fund someone to live in a hemp house. It’s the same principle,” Bekker says.
According to Afrimat Hemp, a conventional building’s carbon footprint is three tonnes higher than that of a 40 square meter (430 square foot) hemp-built home.
“We see this as a bit of a lighthouse project,” Muller says of the Hemp Hotel.
“It shows hemp has its place in the construction sector.”
According to Steve Allin, director of the International Hemp Building Association in Ireland, Hemp Hotel is the “tallest building to incorporate hemp-based materials in the world.”
