The project manager of Western Australia’s first eco-village, partly built with hemp, believes the finished product will add weight to the growing push for it to be widely used in the construction industry.
Project manager Paul Llewellyn said a key feature would be the combination of hemp hurd, the innards of the plant’s stem, and lime, which is used to render the traditional timber frames.
“The two combine to form a lightweight masonry product, which is very thermally efficient, breathes and has lots of acoustic properties,” Mr Llewellyn said.
A thesis of the utilisation of hemp in the construction industry conducted by University of Western Australia student, Gareth Robert Shun’an Jones, concluded lime-hemp concrete (LHC), “provides a superior overall performance in terms of sustainability and comfort levels than comparative ‘green’ building materials, including autoclaved aerated concrete, rammed earth and straw bales”.
Image Credit: Paul Llewellyn
