After I read these articles, I found shoes can be made of all kinds of material. This is a fashion hemp shoes. It is lovely, right? I predict a hot hemp wave is coming up soon. If you think it is dull with no image. No problem, with the shoes printer, you can do any design. Any fashion shoes design you like. I knew there were clothes out there made of hemp and recently we experimented with hemp seeds in our whole food cooking, but I had no idea hemp had been used in footwear applications until very recently. Of course, it makes sense.
Hemp is known to make durable and versatile textiles, so many shoe companies are taking advantage of this flexibility and using this eco friendly and sustainable material. In fact, hemp has been used for over 12,000 years as a fiber resource. Sadly, hemp cannot be grown at an industrial level in the United States because of its association with the drug marijuana, which is also from the cannabis family.
Hemp is a form of cannabis but it is the virtually THC free brother of the well known marijuana plant. Industrial hemp has been used in paper products, biodegradable plastics, health food, textiles and apparel and recently, because of the popularity of using sustainable materials, its popularity and therefore its crops are growing fast! In fact, it is one of the fastest growing crops producing tons of raw material that can be used in a wide variety of industries.
The hemp plant’s fibers are commonly called “bast” and when they are extracted that can be a variety of colors from off white to green and gray. Hemp was widely used for its fiber production throughout history because it produces 250% more fiber than cotton grown on the same land. In fact, the name “cannabis,” comes from the word Canvas, which is what so much hemp was used for historically.
Hemp grows quickly and is a hearty plant, requiring little pesticide and no herbicides to grow well. This lends further credibility of hemp being a sustainable and eco-friendly fiber. Currently, hemp is widely cultivated in Australia, Austria, Canada, the UK, Spain and Russia.
So which of the eco-friendly shoes that we carry incorporate hemp into their construction? Just a few that we know of, but we’re sure this number will continue to grow!