How growing cannabis is helping to clean up the planet

Industrial hemp (a strain of cannabis sativa) is recognised as a billion-dollar crop. The plant's fibre and hurd (inner core of the stem) alone can be used for 30,000 different products.

Cannabis sativa’s reputation as an industry disruptor is often cited as a reason for its original prohibition. Its uses span low- and hi-tech industries, including construction, petrochemical plastics, pharmaceuticals, pulp and paper, alcohol and animal protein feed, among others.

Hemp is also seen as a plant to mitigate against a dystopian climate change future. 

Unlike cotton, hemp cloth requires no pesticides. The less durable cotton uses 25% of the world's pesticides and needs 10,000l of water for each kilogram of fabric, two-thirds more water than hemp.

The plant, among many other things, can also decontaminate radioactive soil through phytoremediation — cleansing of soil contaminants.

In the 30km fall-out zone in Chernobyl, "hemp is proving to be one of the best phyto-remediative plants we have been able to find", says Slavik Dushenkov, a research scientist with Phyotech, one of the companies involved in the decades-long clean-up.

Europe's largest steel plant in Puglia, Italy, has poisoned the environment in a 20km radius. Since 2012, farmers have cultivated millions of hemp plants to ameliorate polluted soil. After harvest the cannabis fibre is processed for the clothing and construction industries.

No similar practices have been adopted on Gauteng's carcinogenic mine dumps, which in some areas record equal or higher radiation levels than Chernobyl.