Hemp is a plant that can be grown almost anywhere in the world. The hemp plant itself contains two main types of fibre – medium/long fibres are extracted from the skin or bark of the plant while short fibres can be found in the wooden ‘hurd’ core of the plant. The hemp plant also produces an abundance of seeds that can be retained for future crops or converted to a range of products from skin lotions to health supplements.
From mankind’s stone age years, non-drug industrial fibre hemp has been an important basic raw material for human activity. The sails, the clothing, the lighting oil, the paper, the food and the building materials that enabled man to explore, trade in, and settle the globe were made from hemp.
Only in the 20th century, under the pressure of the oil companies, chemical companies and other powerful and wealthy enterprises with vested interests to protect did the engine of the world’s economy change from a base of farm-grown carbohydrate materials, to hydrocarbon materials from mined oil and fossil fuels.
The US Government, at the behest of these enterprises, banned the growing of industrial hemp in the USA in 1937. This, of course, was and is a scandal that is only now being rectified, albeit slowly! This is why hemp fibre has been so expensive compared to cotton and synthetic fibres, and why most hemp fibre has lost its natural strength, thereby restricting its use in composite materials.
The technology has been tested and proven and shows that the TCI method and technology extracts the fibre from the hemp plants in a fraction of the time taken by other methods. By reviewing the content of this website you will understand how the TCI harvesting decorticator technology and associated systems takes the basic extraction of hemp fibre from being difficult, labour intensive and costly to being a highly profitable and cost effective agribusiness.
