Home > Today’s Top Stories > Industrial hemp fights climate change by reducing carbon emissions A top view of compressed thermal insulating hemp fiber panels on a rough-textured surface When Matthew “Mattie” Mead, founder of the hemp-based material business Hempitecture shared the idea of using hemp as a sustainable construction material as a student in The Pitch at Hobart and William Smith Colleges competition in 2013, he didn’t win the entrepreneurial leadership contest. Matthew Mead “I recall specifically during the pitch contest, one of the judges saying, ‘So let me get this straight., you’re trying to build houses out of a Schedule 1 substance?” Mead said. “And indeed, industrial hemp was a Schedule 1 substance at the time.” Mead’s response? “Well, we’re the only industrial agriculture nation on earth that bans the production of this crop, and I want to be on the forefront of what I think will be an emerging industry in three to five years,” he said. “It definitely turned some heads and seemed outlandish, but I like to think that most good ideas do at first seem outlandish or impossible.” In December 2018, the Federal Farm Bill that legalized industrial hemp was signed into law. That same year, Mead and his high school friend Tommy Gibbons founded Hempitecture. In 2022 when Mead pitched Hempitecture again at the Grow-NY Food and Agriculture competition in Syracuse he won $500,000. “Hempitecture was founded based on the idea that buildings and their operations are responsible for forty percent of our carbon emissions,” Mead said. “So, it was really designed as a solution to store carbon in building materials. That’s really kind of the core notion of Hempitecture, reconciling embodied carbon and operational carbon.” Mead, who majored in architectural studies and minored in environmental studies and studio art at Hobart […]