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The post-harvest processing of hemp is essential for creating various products such as textiles, wood, bioplastic alternatives, and chemical extracts. Producers need to convert hemp from plant mass to individual materials before it is ready for industrial use. Since the prohibition in the 1940s halted hemp’s progress, the process of industrial hemp processing has been reinvented, and today it stands as one of the more promising ways for farmers to profit from their hemp.
How Does Hemp Go from Stalk to Wood Flooring?
Returning to its roots as an industrial powerhouse in America, Kentucky farmers have grown hemp as a wood substitute since 2014. The first step after harvest is to decorticate the stalks. Some producers decorticate by hand using colonial-era tools, but most use industrial hemp processing equipment to break the stalks into usable fibers. Essentially, this process is smashing the hemp. The short fibers are separated from the long fibers, as the short fibers are ideal for alternative options such as paper production. Hemp wood substitutes are believed to work for structural and exterior builds, but their focus is on the interior.
One outstanding example of Kentucky manufacturing innovation and ingenuity is HempWood®, a lumber alternative that uses hemp and a soy-based glue to make organic flooring and other products. It’s no wonder HempWood won the second annual Kentucky Association of Manufacturers (KAM) 2024 Coolest Thing Made in Kentucky Tournament Presented by Kentucky Farm Bureau Insurance.
Industrial Scale Hemp Processing
Panda Biotech™ commercial operation is up and running with their Panda Hemp Gin. The 500,000-square-foot hemp processing facility in Wichita Falls, Texas, is situated on 97 acres and is the first of its kind and the largest in the Western Hemisphere. The Panda Gin has the capacity to process 10 metric tons of industrial hemp into textile-grade fiber, hurd, short-fiber/hurd mix, and nutrient-rich micronized hurd per hour. It is a zero-waste process, utilizing every part of the industrial hemp stalk, and operates solely on 100 percent renewable energy, making it a paragon of sustainability in the industry.
The Panda Hemp Gin will focus on providing five main product lines from hemp, including mechanically cottonized fiber, decorticated fiber, hurd (cellulose), short-fiber/hurd mix, and nutrient-rich micronized hemp dust. Applications for each product range from consumer and industrial textiles, non-wovens, paper products, bioplastics, biofuel, animal bedding, fiberglass substitutes, construction materials such as hempcrete, mulch, insulation, and more.
New Hemp Refining Techniques
PureHemp Technology is expanding an advanced hemp processing technology that offers several advantages over current biomass conversion methods. The company’s patented continuous countercurrent reactor (“CCR”) technology, combined with other in-line equipment, rapidly transforms hemp stalks and other biomass into raw materials for a wide range of hemp-inspired products. The countercurrent processing method, where solid hemp stalks move in the opposite direction of the liquid reagent, has proven to be highly effective in producing environmentally friendly pulp as the primary product. The extract liquor is further refined into valuable lignin and sugar co-products.
Implementing the CCR technology will significantly enhance the emerging hemp refining industry by economically utilizing hemp stalks to produce hemp-based products. In addition to traditional fiber and botanical products, a variety of new products can be derived from hemp using CCR-derived pulps, lignin, sugars, and extracts.
Hemp pulps can be used in a wide array of products, such as specialty and packaging papers, bathroom and facial tissues, diapers, personal hygiene products, building materials, and sugars for manufacturing foods, beverages, chemicals, and ethanol. Unlike traditional pulping technologies, which take hours to remove lignin from hemp pulp, the CCR takes an average of 4 minutes.
Lignin is another raw material that PureHemp efficiently extracts from hemp using its CCR Technology. Third parties have tested PureHemp lignin and shown it to possess outstanding and unique qualities suitable for producing value-added industrial products, including plastics, coatings, and chemicals.
Sugars produced using the CCR include glucose and xylose, both of which are used in the production of various beverages, nutraceuticals, chemicals, plastics, and other consumer and industrial products.
It’s Only Hemp Science, Not Rocket Science, Yet
Perhaps one day, hemp will be the material used in rocket ships and trains. As the US government stated in “Hemp for Victory,” the plant has been used since ancient times. Pre-industrial societies handled hemp processing by hand to create textiles and medicine for centuries. With the benefit of several industrial revolutions, post-harvest processing has been streamlined and, in many cases, automated. While it’s romantic to do it by hand, the future of hemp processing will rely on centralized processing centers that empower smaller farmers to profit from every part of their harvest.
