With 12 floors, stunning views of Cape Town’s majestic Table Mountain and a minimal ecological footprint, the world’s tallest industrial hemp building will soon open its doors in South Africa.
Workers in central Cape Town are putting the finishing touches on the 54-room Hemp Hotel, due for completion in June.
Hempcrete blocks derived from the hemp plant were used to fill the building’s walls, which were reinforced by a concrete and cement framework.
Hemp bricks are enjoying growing popularity in the construction world due to their insulating, fireproof and climate-friendly properties.
These Blocks are primarily used in Europe for thermal regeneration of existing buildings and are carbon negative – meaning that more greenhouse gases are absorbed from the atmosphere during their manufacture than are absorbed.
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“The plant absorbs the carbon, it gets put into a block and is then stored into a building for 50 years or longer,” explains Boshoff Muller, director of Afrimat Hemp, a subsidiary of South African construction group Afrimat, which produced the bricks for the hotel.
“What you see here is a whole bag full of carbon, quite literally,” Muller says as he pats a bag of mulch at a brick factory on the outskirts of Cape Town, where hemp hurds, water and lime are mixed together to make the blocks.
The industrial hemp used in the Hemp Hotel had to be imported from Britain because South Africa banned domestic production until last year, when the government began issuing cultivation permits.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has made developing the country’s cannabis and marijuana sector an economic priority, saying it could create more than 130,000 jobs.
Afrimat Hemp is now preparing to produce its first blocks, made exclusively from South African hemp.
Wolff Wolf, the 52-year-old architect of the Hemp Hotel, sees this as a game changer in making hemp buildings more prevalent in this corner of the world.
“It shouldn’t be just a high-end product,” says Wolf, whose firm is involved in several social housing projects in South Africa and neighbouring Mozambique.
“Hemp is 20 percent more expensive to build with” compared to conventional materials, says Afrimat Hemp’s carbon consultant Wihan Bekker.
