One of humanity's first fibers
In Asia, hemp was used for weaving and papermaking thousands of years BC.
It is neither a new crop nor a fashionable one — it is one of the oldest crops humans ever learned to cultivate.
The word canvas comes from the word cannabis
Entire fleets relied on hemp: ropes, rigging, sails, hull caulking.
The ships that discovered America sailed under hemp canvas. Maritime powers regarded this fiber as a strategic raw material and stockpiled it like weapons.
Hemp did not lose out to competition. It was removed from the market.
Two reasons, and neither had anything to do with fiber quality.
The 1937 US tax ban and the arrival of cheap petrochemicals — nylon and synthetics from the 1930s, wood pulp in paper. World hemp fiber production fell from more than 300,000 tonnes in 1961 to about 75,000 by the early 1990s.
Both reasons are gone
The US brought industrial hemp back into the legal domain, and Uzbekistan issued its first licences in 2022 — the ban is being lifted country by country.
And petrochemicals are becoming more expensive for the first time in a century: carbon reporting, microplastics, requirements on the origin of raw materials.
It is already in the building code
Hempcrete has been added as a separate appendix to the US International Residential Code.
Carmakers are switching interior panels to natural-fiber composites. This is no longer a trend — it is a standard, and standards are not reversed.
The market is growing faster than plants are being built
The industry's bottleneck is neither demand nor raw material, but processing.
Fiber accounts for 41% of the market; textiles are the fastest-growing application.
Source: Grand View Research, 2026
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