By Natasha Mekhail / Photographs by Bryce Krynski
Ten years ago, the only people wearing hemp T-shirts were padlocked to trees with bulldozers bearing down. Something about tunics the texture of burlap didn’t jive with popular taste. Back then, buying a hemp top meant a trip to the pipe shop. Hemp and marijuana are different plants, but consumers didn’t know the difference. Or care.
Jason Finnis did. He started Hemp Town in Vancouver in 1994 with $300 down. It was illegal to grow the textile crop in Canada at the time, so his company imported raw hemp fabric from China and hired home sewers to cut, dye and stitch the coarse material. He describes those early shirts as “exfoliating.”
A university student studying music, Finnis believed that hemp would revolutionize not only clothing, but also the way environmental products were incorporated into everyday life. “I realized that if we wanted to make this business cross over into the mainstream,” he says, “we were going to have to get much better fabric.”
Today Finnis’ company, Naturally Advanced Technologies Inc. (NAT), is publicly traded. Last year its revenue was $2.5 million. Talk about cracking the mainstream: its eco-clothing sells at Costco and specialty retailers across the country, and Starbucks, Google and Volkswagen buy the T-shirts in bulk for corporate branding. The gunny-sack feel and hippie styling are gone. NAT’s hemp fabrics are so refined the company plans to market high-end, moisture-control performance wear. How Finnis got from A to B has an Alberta connection. But first, some history.
Hemp is one of the world’s oldest crops. Native to Europe, northern India, China and Persia, its seed oil was used for thousands of years in food and as medicine. Its fibres were pressed into paper, twisted into cord and spun into thread for cloth. But the story of hemp in North America is a puzzling weave of conjecture and conspiracy theory.
Hemp was widely grown on this continent for hundreds of years. U.S. founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were hemp farmers; the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper. But in the early 1900s, the argument goes, lobbyists from the American cotton, petro-chemical and forestry-product industries ganged up on the competing cash crop. Prohibition sealed hemp’s fate. It was outlawed in the 1920s and 1930s as an intoxicant. Today it’s still illegal to grow commercial hemp in the U.S., but pressure from scientists and businesspeople like Finnis won its legalization in Canada in 1998.
The rules around growing hemp are strict. The biggest difference between hemp and marijuana is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). The plants growing in basements contain upwards of 15 per cent THC. Farmed hemp has to be less than 0.3 per cent THC by law. Bred for different attributes, drug plants make bad fibres, and vice versa. “For people who think there’s a drug connection to this crop,” says Wade Chute of the Alberta Research Council (ARC), “I always give the analogy that you’d have to huff a joint the size of a telephone pole, and would probably die of smoke inhalation, before you got anywhere.”
Chute heads up the ARC’s pulp and paper team. For the last 10 years, this non-profit research branch of the Alberta government has been studying processing techniques that will help bring hemp to market. ARC scientists know that left to maturity, hemp can be harvested like canola for its nutritional seed oil. If cut young, its fibres are ideal for clothing. Hemp’s strong fibrils and high cellulose make it a potential substitute for fiberglass. Its fermented sugars can be made into fuel.
ARC’s top-secret technology has made the difference between Finnis’ contemporary clothing and those early exfoliating T-shirts. “They’re the guys who understand the markets and have the access to the CEOs of the big companies,” Chute says about entrepreneurs like Finnis. “We’re the guys who give them the technical muscle.” NAT has worldwide exclusive rights to use ARC’s patented process; ARC collects royalties.
NAT is into more than hemp these days. In fact, Finnis changed the name of its clothing division from Hemp Town to HT Naturals after branching out into clothes made from soy, bamboo and other sustainable materials. His philosophy is triple bottom line. “Most companies measure their success just by their profit,” he says. “We measure success by our profit but also by our impact on the environment and our impact on human rights.” That said, he still considers hemp an environmental superstar.
A textile crop like cotton, even if it’s organic, needs a lot of water. Roughly 22,000 litres goes into one kilogram of cotton lint. Hemp, by comparison, uses about 10 per cent of that. Bamboo can also be grown organically, but its processing involves a harsh rinse of chemicals. The reason is its 25 per cent lignen content. Lignen is the glue that binds fibres together and keeps plants upright. By contrast, hemp’s lignen content is only four per cent, so a mild chemical treatment is enough. And unlike other textile fibres that require strong bleach, hemp brightens in a harmless peroxide.
In the field, hemp is a rugged and cooperative crop. It’s a big carbon dioxide consumer, can be fertilized using only manure, and needs considerably less pesticide and herbicide than other field plants. Moreover, as hemp grows it forms a canopy and becomes a fierce competitor that starves out broadleaf weeds. Beyond these minimal inputs, hemp also fetches a high commodity price.
Nat may have the jump on processing technology in Canada, but it’s not alone in making a move to eco-fibres. Indie companies such as Mother Trucker, Passenger Pigeon and Lara’s Label were quick to stitch into sustainable fabrics. Haute couturiers like Armani use hemp and organic cottons as well. Designer Linda Loudermilk created an eco-formal wear line with fabric ingredients like Seacell (algae) and sasawashi (kumazasa leaf). Love ’em or hate ’em, Wal-Mart is the world’s largest buyer of organic cotton. And the 135-year-old Levi’s brand, which originally made hemp jeans, is back in the fold.
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Category: Life
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