Hemp grown to clean up polluted soil could be used for hempcrete construction and to produce energy, with virtually no health risks, an Italian researcher has suggested.
Vito Gallo, Professor of Chemistry at the Polytechnic of Bari, said the hemp plant’s performance in the phyto-remediation (phyto-purification) process leaves only trace amounts of any pollutants behind.
“Hemp allows a sort of dilution of metals in the biomass and this results in material that, in principle, presents very limited or even no health risks,” Gallo, who is also coordinator of BIO SP.HE.RE., a hemp-specific research initiative, told Canapa Industriale.
Gallo suggested that scientific organizations could get together to set acceptable levels of concentration of any foreign substances in downstream hemp products.
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