Yet Another Reason to Love Hemp: Phytoremediation
Hemp is making a comeback in the United States, and it’s about time. Last Friday (Feb. 7, 2014) President Obama signed the new farm bill into law, in which there is a provision that would allow hemp to be cultivated for research in states where it is legal.
Ten states have passed laws enabling hemp cultivation — Colorado, Washington, California, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, Vermont, and West Virginia. But federal policy, which sees no difference between hemp and marijuana, has stifled cultivation in these states.
The U.S. is the only remaining developed nation where the production of industrial hemp is prohibited. Instead, American manufacturers import hemp at a higher cost from countries like Canada, China, or France to produce everything from clothes to cooking oil. In 2011, the U.S. imported $11.5 million worth of legal hemp products — mostly in the form of hemp seed and hemp oil that end up in food products like granola bars.
But there’s yet another reason to love hemp — it’s also used for decontaminating toxic soil. In Ukraine — where hemp has been grown for centuries to produce clothes and food — hemp was planted around site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to decontaminate the soil. The 1986 nuclear disaster spread severe radioactive contamination and toxic metals in soil, plants, and animals as far as 100 km (62 miles) from the site.
Industrial hemp has the ability to “hyperaccumulate” metals, extracting such toxins through their root systems and accumulating them in their tissues without being damaged. In this way, pollutants are either removed from the soil and groundwater or rendered harmless. This process is called phytoremediation, a term that was coined by Dr. Ilya Raskin of Rutgers University’s Biotechnology Center for Agriculture and the Environment. Hemp, mushrooms, and leafy green plants like spinach, chard and the sunflower plant are also effective in phytoremediation, acting as filters or traps to break down organic pollutants and stabilize metal toxins.
In 1998, Phytotech — which specializes in phytoremediation to clean up metals, pesticides, solvents, explosives, and other toxic substances from landfills — planted industrial hemp near the Chernobyl site in cooperation with Consolidated Growers and Processors (CGP) and Ukraine’s Institute of Bast Crops.
“Hemp’s ability to hyper accumulate metals may prove useful for decontaminating toxic waste sites. In Silesia, Cannabis is deliberately cultivated on wasteland contaminated with cadmium and copper. The crop efficiently extracts the toxic metals from soil and accumulates the metals in seeds. The crop is harvested, and the metals are recovered by leaching seeds with hydrochloric acid. In 1999 a hemp crop will be cultivated near Chernobyl, to extract radioactive caesium-137 and strontium-90 from the soil.” — Hemp Diseases and Pests: Management and Biological Control
Phytoremediation is considered a better, less costly alternative to conventional soil restoration techniques. One example involves relocating the contaminated soil and replacing it with good soil. Not only is phytoremediation less costly, it’s applicable to a broad range of metals and leaves minimal environmental disturbance. Given that there are over 30,000 sites that require hazardous waste treatment in the U.S. alone according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — in addition to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown — hemp’s gradual return to legitimacy with the passage of the farm bill is long overdue. Phytoremediation is being applied near the site of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, where sunflower fields have been planted to decontaminate the poisoned land.
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