Hemp building materials will take a prominent place at the Rocky Mountain Natural Building Conference Bozeman Sept. 18-20. Hemp will take the podium along with cob, straw bale, passive house, natural plaster and other natural building technologies, at the Colorado-based Natural Building Alliance's biennial conference held since 2003.

After years of efforts from USHBA volunteers and consultants, the governing body for national building codes in the United States released a residential building code that included hemp-lime (hempcrete) for the first time.

A Colorado engineering professor’s 2020 research has given builders and designers a new way to measure the way hemp-based biomaterials can store carbon in buildings. By comparing data from a life cycle assessment of hemp+lime insulation, or hempcrete, using digital tools, builders can easily see the benefits of hemp as compared to traditional construction materials.

A long-awaited digital carbon footprint calculator for building materials is expected to drop within weeks from a Canadian green builders group with a long history in carbon-sequestering hemp building.

Microsoft just funded a new report from the Carbon Leadership Forum at the University of Washington College of Built Environments on the carbon sequestering abilities of hemp and five other construction methods that have the ability to convert our built environments from a source of carbon emissions to a carbon sink.