Minnesota appears to be the first US state on the path to adopting the newest official residential building codes featuring hempcrete and strawbale. The nine-member Technical Advisory Group voted in favor of hempcrete and strawbale, said advocates who had to appear before the advisory board twice with significant revisions to finally get approval.
“When we walked out of the hearing we were hugging and high-fiving and screaming,” Danny Desjarlais, head of the hempcrete team at the Lower Sioux Community said. Desjarlais credited an international “Dream Team” of more than 20 local and North American architects, engineers and building-science pros committed to using non-toxic natural bio-based materials. “They did all the hard work,” Desjarlais said.
Minnesota has been a center of US hempcrete construction activity and activism mostly thanks to the determination of the Lower Sioux, of one of the nation’s tiniest tribal communities. Tribe members have already built four hempcrete homes on their reservation, largely from hemp grown and processed on site. The Lower Sioux received a nearly $5 million grant in 2024 from the US Environmental Protection Agency to renovate 30 homes with hempcrete on the reservation.
Other natural building code writers included Berkeley, CA-based architect Martin Hammer and engineer Anthony Dente of Verdant Structural Engineers; Tucson-based architect David Eisenberg of the nonprofit Development Center for Appropriate Technology (DAT) and Canadian Building Science Engineer John Straube of RDH Building Science and the University of Waterloo. “We all worked on the presentations a lot together,” Hammer said. “That was definitely teamwork. These proposals needed guidance and input to get it right.”
Adopting natural building methods into the official state code means cutting red tape for builders, designers and homeowners, making things much more affordable to build a hempcrete or strawbale home.
The code changes still need to be finally approved by the state building officials at the overarching agency, the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry. But advocates believe that will soon happen. The hard work is done.
One of the reasons the Lower Sioux tribe was able to move so quickly with hempcrete construction was that as a sovereign nation, the tribe is NOT subject to state building code restrictions.
Advocates hope more states will adopt the 2024 IRC’s natural building appendices, falling in a domino effect as the word gets out. Already, the City of Austin, TX officially adopted the hempcrete appendix into residential codes in April of this year.
Meanwhile, Minnesota’s hempcrete folks will be celebrating the state’s trailblazing win with the 13th Annual International Hemp Building Symposium, to be held at the Jackpot Casino on the Lower Sioux Reservation October 3-5.
You can read the original article at www.hempbuildmag.com