By Garrett Rudolph
As a former lumber man, David Seber knows the value of the forests.
He also knows that using hundred-year-old trees for building materials cannot be sustained in the long run.
“If we lose the world’s forests, we’re going to be in big trouble and we’re very close to doing that now,” Seber said.
More than two decades ago, that philosophy and the feeling of being indebted to the forest initiated Seber’s mission to unearth a better building material.
What he found was hemp — the only plant in a temperate climate with the capacity to replace the amount of fiber from trees used for building materials, he said.
“When you take a tree that takes 200-300 years to mature to build a house that’s going to last 50 years, you’re behind the curve,” he said.
But when you build a house with hemp — a plant that matures in about 120 days — “you’re ahead of the curve,” Seber said.
Although his initial interest was in creating building materials, Seber eventually realized there wasn’t enough hemp production in the entire world to replace the construction industry’s voracious hunger for wood fiber.
It was a chance meeting with a leading paint chemist that shifted his focus and led to the creation of Hemp Shield.
“It turns out we created a totally revolutionary product,” Seber said. “Almost every aspect of it is revolutionary.”
Hemp Shield is a wood finish and deck sealer that comes in four colors — cedar, redwood, chestnut and hickory — plus clear. There’s also a secondary product line designed specifically for log homes.
“The foundation of this tremendous product is the hemp seed oil,” Seber said. “The molecules are smaller than the molecules found in other sealers so it penetrates the wood better.”
Hemp Shield gets all its hemp seed oil from Canada. The oil is extracted from industrial hemp plants via a cold-press process.
The Eugene, Oregon-based company has been in operation for about four years, during which the number of retailers carrying the product has steadily expanded. With orders regularly coming in from new retailers, Seber said he expects to see a big spike in sales during the next year.
And he makes no bones about how he believes his product stacks up against the competition.
“We feel like we’ve made the best deck sealer ever,” the Hemp Shield CEO said.
The benefits include being non-toxic, low-VOC and environmentally friendly, Seber said.
It contains none of the chemicals that are considered hazardous air pollutants by the Environmental Protection Agency. The clear sealer contains 0 percent volatile organic compounds, while the colored products measure 3 percent VOCs.
It’s a one-coat application, he said, so a gallon of Hemp Shield covers 450-650 square feet.
It’s also resistant to the slipperiness most decks get in wet weather due to the time-released biocides and fungicides incorporated into the Hemp Shield formula.
“Here in Oregon, if you walk out on a deck, you’ll break your neck because you’ll slip,” Seber said. “That doesn’t happen with Hemp Shield.”
The company has performed accelerated weathering tests to compare Hemp Shield to the leading national brands. According to Seber, Hemp Shield outperformed all the leading brands.
While those tests revealed the sealer’s potential, Seber said his customers’ real-world input is even more impressive.
He said with very few exceptions, none of the customers that have used Hemp Shield in the past four years are talking about recoating their decks, Seber said.
“That’s a very, very powerful statement right there,” he said.
The road to developing Hemp Shield was by no means a straight path.
Starting in the early 1990s, Seber set out to produce a medium-density fiber board that could compete with traditional wood fiber boards.
His motivator, right from the beginning, was the environmental impact.
“I was interested in seeing if there was a way to save the forest,” he said. “Where are we going to put all the carbon if we keep taking trees out of the forest?”
Seber presented his eco-friendly hemp fiber board at the International Wood Composites Symposium, held every year at Washington State University.
“After successfully presenting that, I was on top of the world,” Seber said. “I thought I had it knocked.”
That presentation opened the door for a 1993 meeting with a major lumber mill in Southern Oregon.
The reaction he got was exactly what he had hoped — and at the same time, exactly what he had feared.
“They said, ‘Dave, we know what you did, we know that it works. … But we use 1,400 dry tons of fiber every day, 323 days a year. As soon as you’re ready to come in and be competitive with wood waste, we’re ready to switch.’ And he put it in writing.”
But reality hit quickly. Seber would never be able to meet the demand to replace nearly 1 billion pounds of wood fiber annually.
“The truth of it is that we don’t have the quantity,” he said. “If you took all the hemp that’s being grown in Canada and threw in most of the hemp that’s being grown in Europe, you might be able to run one good mill for a few weeks.”
Even more than 20 years later, the outlook for hemp production hasn’t changed significantly. With very few exceptions, all industrial hemp comes from outside the United States.
Restrictive laws that generally lump industrial hemp with THC-laced cannabis have caused “amnesia” about “how tremendous this country was when it was a major producer of hemp,” Seber said.
Attention paid toward the legalization of marijuana, both for medicinal and recreational purposes, initially detracted from the American hemp movement.
However, hemp is slowly beginning to see a revival, Seber said.
He sees it as a vehicle to reenergize family farms and local environment, while sustaining the environment at the same time.
“Which is the exact opposite of what is going on today,” Seber said. “I see that if we don’t do it, we might not be on this planet too much longer. The truth of it is that our forests are upset. Our environment is upset. It turns out that hemp could be a major contributor to changing these factors. Since the oceans are also at risk — and our watersheds — it becomes more relevant every day.”