Hemp Shield: A New Revolution in Building Materials by Josh Davis
Dave Seber is a man on a mission. His goal: to ignite an industrial hemp economic“ eco-revolution” in the U. S. and he’ s doing it one can of hemp wood sealant at a time.
Dave began his lumber career in the 80s, working in the redwood lumberyards of Oregon. As the years went on he became acutely aware of our country’ s increasing demand for fiber *, wood, paper products, and with it, the continuous clear-cutting of the old growth forests. This was of great concern for Dave- he recognized early on that this aggressive destruction would render the forests non-sustainable, and if things continued, as they were the great forests of the northwest( and all over the world) would be nothing more than a memory.
Today, 30 plus years later, Dave Seber is the President of the Hemp Shield Company and Co-Creator of Hemp Shield Wood Finish & Deck Sealer™. According to Dave,“ Hemp Shield™ is totally environmentally friendly. It’ s made with 100 percent hemp oil as one of the major components. The colored versions have very low VOC‘ s( volatile organic compounds) and in the clear version has zero VOC’ s. It has no hazardous air pollutants, no fumes, it’ s high coverage, it’ s a single coat application, cleans up with soap and water and it’ s priced economically. Basically, It may be the best deck sealer that was ever invented.” Not such humble words from a humble man. But hey, if you got it flaunt it.
Shortly after the New Year THC had a chance to interview Dave about his ongoing contributions to the hemp industry as well as his vision and hope for the future.
THC: Hi Dave! Let’ s get right to it. In the 80s you were working at a redwood lumber yard. How did hemp appear on your radar?
Dave Seber: I’ ve been in the building material industry for my entire life. So yes, in the early 80s I sold redwood lumber and the guy I got my supply from was a gentleman named Bill Conde who is pretty infamous, being known as a strong, long time hemp advocate. Now, I felt like I owed dues to the forests because I was making a living off of them, so I tried to find out what we could use to replace the amount of fiber that we took out of the forests.
THC: Let me guess, hemp?
Seber: Exactly, I came to the conclusion after doing a study that the only plant in the temperate regions that could replace the amount of fiber that we take out of the forest is hemp.
THC: How did you come to that conclusion?
Seber: In the early 90s I did a study of the various plants and the amount of fiber yield per acre they had versus the amount of fiber that we were taking out of the forests. The average composite mill, for example, uses 400 to 1400 dry tons of fiber every day, so this is a tremendous strain. What I found was that hemp was the only possible plant that could produce enough yield with a high enough grade of fiber to replace the fiber that was coming out of the forests. Beyond hemp’ s
58 April / May
fiber, feed, and oil yields, hemp is a sustainable raw materials source— wood isn’ t. A hemp crop takes 120 to 160 days from seed to harvest, where even“ tree farms” take 10 to 25 years to produce a single crop. While I was working on this with Bill Conde we contacted Washington State University’ s Wood Material and Engineering Lab and asked them if they would be interested in developing some hemp composites to demonstrate to the industry that hemp was as usable in their mills as wood fiber.
THC: What was the outcome of your experimentation with the hemp composite boards?
Seber: It was very successful. In the early 90s we produced the first Medium-Density Fiberboard *( MDF).
THC: And was it just as good as an MDF made from wood fiber?
Seber: Oh yeah. Remember these( boards) are called‘ engineered products’ which means that they have a very specific set of parameters that they are based on. Now those parameters were originally developed because they studied the various qualities of wood, its modulus of elasticity *, its modulus of rupture * and its internal bond characteristics * and they isolated them to make a set of standards. When you make an engineered product you want to hit those standards.
THC: Ok, so you hit that standard?
Seber: The truth of it is that during the process of developing potential boards we actually produced a few hemp boards that were three times stronger than lumber, but when we were finally finished our product came within less than 5 percent of the actual standard for particleboard and MDF and this is exactly what we wanted to show that the product could do.
THC: Why not make the stronger boards if you could?
Seber: It wasn’ t a question of trying to be stronger or better. It was a question of showing the industry how it actually conformed to the current standards to gage engineered products. We also proved to the manufacturers that this could be accomplished with very minor modifications in their manufacturing plants as they had them. That was very important.
THC: Did anything else come out of your research?
Seber: While we were doing this work at WSU Joe Strobel contacted us. He had the first experimental license to grow industrial hemp in Canada. His license was contingent upon someone taking the actual hemp stalks that he grew and producing an industry standard prototype out of them. He sent some stalks directly to the lab at WSU, and we produced a world class MDF panel for him. We sent him back the panel and he showed it to the Canadian government. After they saw it they eliminated the