Can Hemp Give Us Zero Waste Plastic?

More than half the plastic in the world is made in the United States. The sheer amount of oil that goes into making that plastic is mind-boggling to contemplate, particularly when you consider how finite oil is as a resource. While it’s possible for us to recycle our plastic, only a small percentage of all the plastic in the world makes its way into those blue bins. Entirely too much of it winds up in our garbage dumps, cluttering up our landscape, and floating in our oceans.

But what if we stopped using plastic made from oil? Our world has come to expect plastic in our vehicles, in our packaging, and to store our drinks in… but what if we could toss that plastic on the ground, and in a few months it had degraded away to nothing?

We’ve been able to make plastic hemp since at least the 1920s. Henry Ford himself was looking into the technology as a way to make his cars more lightweight and ecologically friendly, according to Hemp Plastic, but it was simply not cost-effective enough at the time. However, it’s been nearly a century since then, and we can easily make plastic hemp. Not only that, but if we really invested in it, it’s possible we could replace a huge percentage of the harmful plastic we use with this safer, biodegradable zero plastic waste alternative.

That will, of course, require big businesses and governments to embrace the use of plastic hemp, and to step away from another oil-based resource. Whether that will happen remains to be seen.