How does hemp work?

Hemp fibers are coarse and strong, perfect for things like rope -- hemp is also more environmentally friendly than many other crops. Listen in as Marshall Brain takes a look at the controversy surrounding hemp in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot com where
smart happens. Hi Am Marshall Brain with today's question, how

(00:23):
does hamp work? When most people think about fibers for cloth,
what they think about is things like cotton or wool.
With cotton and wool, you can comb them out, spin
them and create thread very easily. This thread is great
for making cloth that's soft to the skin, but it's
not very strong. Hamp, on the other hand, is a
lot like flax and flaxes where linning comes from. In

(00:46):
both hemp and flax, the fibers are in the stock
of the plant. The fibers are something like the threads
you see in a stock of celery. Their long, stringy
and tough to get at. The fibers you comb them
out of the woody part of the dried stock. The
fibers tend to be coarser than cotton or wool. But
they are very strong. This strength makes hemp great for

(01:08):
things like rope. The reason why hemp shows up in
organic magazines and catalogs is because it's very friendly to
the environment. For example, environmentally conscious people like these aspects
of hemp. First, cotton raised in the United States requires
millions of pounds of pesticides of fertilizers. It's a very

(01:28):
intensive crop that takes a lot out of land. Bugs
like bowl weevils love cotton, and they must be killed
with insecticides. Hemp, on the other hand, is a weed.
You can grow hemp using much less fertilizer and pesticide. Second,
hemp fibers can be used in many different ways. With hemp.
You can make cloth, paper, cardboard, fiber board, and lots

(01:50):
of other stuff. By using hemp for paper and construction materials,
pressure is removed from forests. Hemp also grows much faster
and more densely than trees do. The problem with hemp
is that the hemp plant is also known as the
cannabis plant, which is also known as the marijuana plant.
This connection to marijuana is what makes hemp such a

(02:11):
hot issue in the United States. There are varieties of
fiber hemp that eliminate the drug component of the plant
to a large degree, But the concern is that it
would be very easy to hide drug plants in a
crop of fiber plants. So at the moment, hemp production
in the United States is stalled and it's a source
of continuous debate. Do you have any ideas or suggestions

(02:33):
for this podcast? If so, please send me an email
at podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more
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(02:56):
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