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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot com where
Speaker 1: smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, how
Speaker 1: does hamp work? When most people think about fibers for cloth,
Speaker 1: what they think about is things like cotton or wool.
Speaker 1: With cotton and wool, you can comb them out, spin
Speaker 1: them and create thread very easily. This thread is great
Speaker 1: for making cloth that's soft to the skin, but it's
Speaker 1: not very strong. Hamp, on the other hand, is a
Speaker 1: lot like flax and flaxes where linning comes from. In
Speaker 1: both hemp and flax, the fibers are in the stock
Speaker 1: of the plant. The fibers are something like the threads
Speaker 1: you see in a stock of celery. Their long, stringy
Speaker 1: and tough to get at. The fibers you comb them
Speaker 1: out of the woody part of the dried stock. The
Speaker 1: fibers tend to be coarser than cotton or wool. But
Speaker 1: they are very strong. This strength makes hemp great for
Speaker 1: things like rope. The reason why hemp shows up in
Speaker 1: organic magazines and catalogs is because it's very friendly to
Speaker 1: the environment. For example, environmentally conscious people like these aspects
Speaker 1: of hemp. First, cotton raised in the United States requires
Speaker 1: millions of pounds of pesticides of fertilizers. It's a very
Speaker 1: intensive crop that takes a lot out of land. Bugs
Speaker 1: like bowl weevils love cotton, and they must be killed
Speaker 1: with insecticides. Hemp, on the other hand, is a weed.
Speaker 1: You can grow hemp using much less fertilizer and pesticide. Second,
Speaker 1: hemp fibers can be used in many different ways. With hemp.
Speaker 1: You can make cloth, paper, cardboard, fiber board, and lots
Speaker 1: of other stuff. By using hemp for paper and construction materials,
Speaker 1: pressure is removed from forests. Hemp also grows much faster
Speaker 1: and more densely than trees do. The problem with hemp
Speaker 1: is that the hemp plant is also known as the
Speaker 1: cannabis plant, which is also known as the marijuana plant.
Speaker 1: This connection to marijuana is what makes hemp such a
Speaker 1: hot issue in the United States. There are varieties of
Speaker 1: fiber hemp that eliminate the drug component of the plant
Speaker 1: to a large degree, But the concern is that it
Speaker 1: would be very easy to hide drug plants in a
Speaker 1: crop of fiber plants. So at the moment, hemp production
Speaker 1: in the United States is stalled and it's a source
Speaker 1: of continuous debate. Do you have any ideas or suggestions
Speaker 1: for this podcast? If so, please send me an email
Speaker 1: at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, go to how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. This episode of brain Stuff is
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Speaker 1: Stuff