You may have seen hemp sheets or towels and been a bit surprised when you did. Hemp was actually used to create ship’s sails in the early days of the founding of America. Many ships that found their way to our early Boston harbors had hemp sails and used hemp ropes to tie off at the docks. There is a lot more to know about hemp fiber and hemp clothing. In fact, there are many benefits to wearing hemp clothing that will have you screaming out the door to buy hemp clothes.
Top Ten Reasons to Wear Hemp Clothing:
1) Hemp doesn’t need any pesticides – that’s right, this crop is full of its own terpenes (the things that cause it to smell the way it does) and bugs hate the smell of cannabis. The terpenes serve as a protection from the environment, namely bugs. Cotton, as an industrialized plant, uses nearly 25% of all the pesticides made in the entire world, because bugs love it. By switching to hemp, we’d use tons less pesticide each year, which means native birds, plants, and honey bees would be protected.
2) Hemp doesn’t use hardly any water to grow. In fact, when compared to cotton, hemp uses only a third of the water necessary to grow to full maturity as cotton does. Hemp also will produce more per acre than cotton – three times as much as a matter of fact.
3) It is super duper strong. Christopher Columbus used hemp sails and ropes. We still use it today because of its strength and ability to hold together wash after wash in the commercial washing machines at laundromats or your gentle cycle at home, it won’t matter. Hemp will hold color and stay in one piece for far longer than cotton will.
4) Hemp has been used in textiles for longer than cotton. In fact, in the 1820s, 85% of the textiles made in the world were from hemp. This included sheets, clothing, and even shoes.
5) Hemp is hypoallergenic! If you are allergic to many fibers, you’ll be pleased to learn that hemp won’t bother your skin, even the most delicate skin is not sensitive to hemp. It has a natural protein structure that helps it fight bacteria, staying cleaner and safer against your skin for longer.
6) Wearing hemp is like wearing SPF 15 sunscreen. It naturally filters out the dangerous UVB rays of sunshine, preventing sunburns and skin cancer from occurring as well. Makers can manipulate the hemp when creating clothing and create products that are as high as SPF 50.
7) It is a thermoregulator, similar to bamboo clothing. If you are chilly, it will help to warm you and if you are overly warm, it will breathe and allow you to cool your skin down.
8) Hemp cleans the soil that it is planted in. This means that farmers will be able to rotate this crop to continue removing toxins and contaminants from soil on a regular basis, keeping their soil cleaner and healthier without having to add things to it to manipulate it chemically.
9) Hemp fibers can be made as soft as cotton with new processes. Levis jeans recently announced that they had made the first hemp jeans that are as soft as cotton jeans that have a longer life expectancy than cotton, with more breathability and comfort. Hemp is good for your skin and won’t cause breakouts and discomfort. The oils from hemp are often used in creating skin care products, so you can rest assured that the clothing won’t damage your skin either.
10) Hemp products are all biodegradable. If you wear out a piece of clothing, you can toss it in the compost bin or throw it in the garbage without regret. It will break down and compost into soil in just a few short weeks. Hemp is even being made into biodegradable plastics now. Hemp is one of the most environmentally friendly products on the market in every way.
These are just a few of the ways in which hemp can bring balance back to the planet and restore the natural way of living here on earth. We could create biodegradable clothing that is comfortable and healthy to wear. Petroleum products can be replaced with hemp products. Paper products can be made from hemp and no tree would ever need to be chopped down again.
Hemp could be a big economic boost to farmers, to jobs, and to the GDP of the United States if hemp is better embraced by companies making clothing and textiles. It is a relatively easy, low-stress crop to grow which requires less investment in care, fewer natural resources (water), and less manpower hours to maintain until harvest.
There are many uses for hemp, not just in clothing. It is being used to replace some petroleum products, such as plastics, which are harmful to the environment because they don’t break down. The hemp plastics will biodegrade in a couple of weeks. This is an amazing look to the future and how we can clean the planet and the oceans and restore them to pristine conditions as they used to be, before they were filled with plastics.
Hemp as a cash crop could become one of the biggest exports of our country if we played the market right, worked on creating lines of clothing that is both economical as well as environmentally useful. People in equatorial countries could benefit from the cooling nature of hemp, for example. When you look at the pros and cons, there are so few cons that they aren’t worth listing.
As a nation, we need to make the switch to hemp. Hemp clothing, hemp building products (have you heard of hempcrete?), hemp supplements, and hemp textiles of all sorts are what we should be supporting. If we totally go hemp crazy, we could save the planet and reverse course. Get on board and use
It’s up to Americans to support what they want by choosing where to spend their dollars and calling and emailing congressional leaders and the makers of these products to find out how you can buy them. Then support those stores which carry them. Market demand wins every single time.