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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (186149)	9/24/2001 6:28:25 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Hi Karen Lawrence; That hemp would be a cheaper way of making paper than trees is an old and silly pot head argument for legalizing marijuana. Hemp has some great uses. The best one is rope. As far as paper goes, forget about it. Hemp has to be harvested every year, trees you just plant and leave alone for 5 years. Automatic equipment strips off the bark and what's left is just a few simple chemical steps away from being paper. Hemp has problems. There are probably some types of paper that hemp is better than trees for, but not for the bulk uses of paper today. There are 132+ countries on this planet. If hemp were such a great idea for making paper, there would be a place out there putting out paper so cheap that they would be taking away market share from wood pulp. The simple fact is that there just isn't any such business. Demand for hemp was already on the wane when it was made illegal. Yes, the frigate USS Enterprise used boatloads of hemp, but that was 1806. In 2001, the carrier USS Enterprise isn't made of wood and doesn't use wind for propulsion. Don't bother giving me the (voluminous) links to articles on hemp / paper production. They're all over the web. The problem is that the hemp solution can't beat wood pulp for cost. Wood based paper production is too cheap to beat, at least at this time. They're constantly improving the tree varieties to reduce costs. Humans are brutally competitive, if hemp were a big money saver somebody would be doing it. Instead, a few small operations make high cost hemp products and sell it at high prices to the soft headed ecological reefer madness crowd. This partly explains the high price for a hemp pulp: about US $2500 per ton versus about US $400 for a typical bleached wood pulp. commonlink.com And as long as I'm on this topic, the articles like the above don't talk about the consequences of moving to a full scale production of hemp. Let me take just one sentence from the above and illustrate this: "Hemp does not need pesticides or herbicides, and yields three to four times more usable fibre per hectare per annum than forests." (1) If we converted all our paper forests to hemp we would end up with the same monoculture type agricultural issue that every other bulk agricultural product faces. Give mother nature a few years, *she will find a pest for hemp.* I know, hemp has all those funky chemicals and that makes it naturally tough on insects, but so did tobacco. When tobacco is grown on a few isolted plots it does not need pesticides or herbicides. The same thing applies to all the stuff that mom and pop grow in their backyards. But when you grow square miles of it, you end up using pesticides. This is the way of all nature. Mother nature expands to fill profitable vacuums. (2) The yield per acre per annum is not a realistic measure of the cost of hemp as a wood substitute. If it were, why is hemp pulp 6x the cost of wood pulp? With trees, nature provides us with an almost perfect store of fibre in the sapwood of (specially bred) pulp wood trees. That fibre is very convenient for the modern pulp industry as it is very easy to clean and process. *Most of the cost of paper is in the production, not the raw materials.* As far as the cost of raw materials, hemp requires replanting every year, or even multiple times per year, and that means more costs. By contrast to trees, hemp stalks are much smaller in diameter and have a lot more variance between the material in the center of the stalk and that on the outside. (3) Wood for pulp use is a convenient byproduct of forests planted for poles and dimensional lumber. That is, a forest owner will go through and plant 1-year old saplings 6 feet apart (at a total cost, including labor, of less than 10 cents each). After a few years, every other tree is cut down and used for paper. A few years later, half the remaining trees are cut down for poles. Some years later the trees are thinned again. The remaining few trees per acre are eventually cut for the beautiful dimensional lumber that we all love. This is full useage of the land and since a forestry company has land in all the various stages, it provides a wonderful place to hunt, fish, and recreate in for most of its productive life. Rather than reading the wacko left wing articles on hemp production, it would be better to *simply take a few introductory classes in wood science at the local university offering a degree in silviculture.* I'm not saying that hemp will always be more expensive than wood pulp. All I'm saying is that as of now, it isn't even close. Who knows what the future will bring. But even as hemp production and processing techniques are improved, so are wood production and processing techniques being improved. Humans are as competitive as hell. If it were highly profitable to make hemp paper, believe me, they'd be out there doing it. What pisses me off about this is that there are so many people who've never planted even a few thousand trees (less than one day's work) but think that they are such incredible experts on forestry that they are willing to pass laws that the industry and land owners in this country must follow. -- Carl