HEMPITECTURE’S SUSTAINABLE SUCCESS Shaping the Built Environment with Hemp By Lori Williams | Photos by Mattie Mead
The Wood River Valley, during its historic boomtown days, with mining, sheepherding, tourism, agriculture, was full of innovate, ambitious individuals. These days, entrepreneurship booms big and millennials crowd the headlines. A case in point—Hempitecture. Headquartered in Ketchum, the company is the leading U.S. manufacturer and distributor of HempWool® thermal insulation, and broke ground this past October in Jerome County to build a 21,632-square-foot state-of-the-art manufacturing facility—the first in the U.S.—for nonwoven technical hemp products. In 2020, co-founders Mattie Mead and Tommy Gibbons made the Forbes 30 under 30 list in Manufacturing and Industry, and were named a ‘stand-out’ company in a Startup Accelerator.
The architect major was so intrigued that he added environmental science studies to his courseload and learned that our built environment is responsible for more carbon footprint and energy consumption than transportation or manufacturing. It was in his senior thesis research on earth material architecture that Mead discovered that France was using the hemp stalk with limestone to make a material known as hempcrete or hemp lime. “It was a lightbulb moment for me, what an incredible opportunity there was here in the U.S.,” Mead says. At the time, 2012, there were fewer than five hempcrete buildings in the U.S.—one in Hailey. He began to develop a business concept around the use of hempcrete building blocks. Industrial hemp was still federally illegal.
Hempitecture serendipitously began when Mead was in college in upstate New York and watched daily as the Seneca Meadows Landfill grew in the distance, and learned that 25% of its growth was construction demolition waste.
Mead entered business plan competitions, finishing several times as a finalist, but never winning. And he was laughed at for proposing to build out of a “schedule one” substance. Mead’s response? To predict that industrial hemp would be
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