In this episode, we’re heading to New Castle to see how the folks at DON are building a hemp industry from the ground up to support their vision of healthy, affordable, accessible housing.
In this episode, we’re heading to New Castle to see how the folks at DON are building a hemp industry from the ground up to support their vision of healthy, affordable, accessible housing.
Burgess Brown: For the past several episodes, we've been exploring the hemp lime building
world in depth with folks who are working in that space every day.
Ava Robinson: This episode, we're zooming out a bit to investigate the potential power of
hemp lime. We've heard how hemp just might be able to revitalize several
different industries and re-ignite former manufacturing towns. But so far those
conversations have been largely academic. We said this could work, and that we
hope it will work.
Burgess Brown: But this isn't just an idea. It's actually beginning to happen. And one of the
places where it's happening is New Castle, Pennsylvania.
Speaker: New Castle is the epitome of family. Perfect? Maybe not. Perfectly positioned?
Absolutely. In the heart of Lawrence County, this Rust Belt town is known as
being the fireworks capital of the country. It's also...
Burgess Brown: Welcome back to Trace Material.
Ava Robinson: New Castle, Pennsylvania is not unlike a lot of rust belt towns in America.
Manufacturing and industry once supplied the majority of jobs in what was a
thriving small city. But once those dried up, an entire culture and way of life
went with them.
Speaker: And when the jobs disappeared, the shops, the banks, the people disappeared
too.
Burgess Brown: But of course a shrinking city does not mean a dead one. We here at Healthy
Materials Lab became aware of New Castle because of the groundbreaking
accessibility work one particular organization is doing there.
Court Hower: Affordable, accessible housing is not good enough, and we should not settle for
just affordable, accessible housing. We need to strive for healthy, affordable,
accessible housing.
Ava Robinson: That's Court Hower, executive vice president of community resources and
development at DON Services. DON, or D-O-N, stands for disability options
network. The network is made up of several collaborative nonprofits, all of
which seek to deinstitutionalize the lives of people with disabilities.
Lori Daytner: Our founder realized that there was a key part missing to fulfilling the mission.
And that is home ownership. If people with disabilities face huge barriers to
finding employment, then getting their own home and owning their own home
is next to impossible. So he set about to change that.
Burgess Brown: And that's Lori Daytner. She's the vice president of program development at
DON and has been hard at work on their project to build a hemp home. That
hemp home is obviously where DON Services and HML's interest intersect. Like
us, they aren't interested in crafting boutique homes only for those who can
afford it. They're interested pretty much the exact opposite of that, actually.
Lori Daytner: New Castle is a city that was at one time, at its peak, a population of about
50,000. It shrunk to less than half of that now. So there is a lot of housing stock
that is empty. That is deteriorating. There's a lot of blight. And when Chris took
a look at this, he said, you know, there's a way out of this. There's a way to, to
solve these problems by taking on blight remediation. And so he decided to do
that. He pulled together a construction company. We went after grant money
from FHL bank, and we used that money to provide gap funding for the houses
that we renovate and the new homes that we build. Everything that we build is
fully accessible. You don't have to have a disability to qualify for purchasing one
of these homes. The homes cost about 120 to $140,000 to build, and we sell
them for about 42 to $47,000. The difference being made up by those FHL bank
grants. We don't make money off of this, but we're improving the place that we
live in for ourselves and our neighbors. We've renovated and built six homes to
date. And we have 11 more in the works. One of which will be a hemp home.
Ava Robinson: Lori is a New Castle native who's seen it change a lot over the course of her life.
But, like most people, she has a lot of pride in her hometown.
Lori Daytner: When I was growing up, it was a bustling little city. 50,000 by no means, was it,
you know, a major metropolis, but you had a defined downtown center.
Everyone would go downtown to do their shopping. There were a lot of
restaurants. There were small mom and pop shops. It was a really good place to
grow up. There were a lot of jobs to be had in manufacturing and in those
service industries and little by little, it just fell under the influence of, of what
happened with the Rust Belt. I mean, industries just kept going away. And so
people would move away. Houses would be empty. They would just be
abandoned.
Burgess Brown: Lori hasn't spent her whole life in New Castle. Until 2014, actually, she was
nowhere near Western Pennsylvania. After graduating college, she spent much
of her adult life in Russia and central Europe managing a restaurant group there.
After about 20 years, she came back to New Castle to help care for her father
and her aunts and uncles, so they wouldn't have to go into nursing homes.
Lori Daytner: I have committed to stay in this area until, or as long as they need me. And so
five years went by where I wasn't working officially. I was caregiving, but I got to
the point where I could return to work. And I started looking and New Castle, as
I said, is a depressed area. There weren't many opportunities, but I got very
lucky. A friend of mine put my resume in front of Chris Lloyd, the founder of the
DON group. And he called me up and we had a short conversation. I think he
liked what he heard in that. Why I had such a gap in my resume of five years, it
fit perfectly with one of his missions, which is to deinstitutionalize the country. I
was very intrigued. He hadn't mentioned hemp in the initial phone call, but I
said, yes, I'll come talk to you. And I did. And he talked about doing something
with hemp. I've never been a farmer myself. Although my grandparents had a
farm and we grew up planting and picking potatoes. I don't think that qualifies
me to be a, you know, to call myself a farmer.
Ava Robinson: DON Services isn't just building with hemp. They're basically trying to develop
every stage of the supply chain, which we know is quite a lot of work. They're
helping farmers grow it and creating a market for hemp products. The idea is to
create a regional industry that would completely support itself.
Lori Daytner: The vision was for us to develop a hemp based industry in order to create
economic opportunity for our regional farmers and to create jobs. Chris had an
idea that he would like to invest in large-scale decortication, but in order to do
that, you have to have enough raw material to process. And you also have to
have an end-user pipeline to make it economically viable.
Burgess Brown: The first step for DOn was unsurprisingly to get plants in the ground. They
partnered with a farmer and planted the first hemp in Pennsylvania, outside of a
research program, in 80 years. Like most of the people we've spoken to who
farm hemp, it wasn't immediately usable.
Lori Daytner: The result was not great. However, it yielded a ton of learning. I got to see the
harvest, which was literally Chris, Phil, my husband and I going out into this field
and pulling this stuff up by hand, it came up quite sparsely. We didn't realize
that the seeds that we had had a really poor germination rates. We planted it
too deeply. We had an incredibly heavy rain year. Record rains. So all of that
kind of came together to yield a pretty poor result as far as the crop was
concerned. But those lessons were very well learned. And this year we
expanded our farmer partner growing program to seven farmers. We have five
farmers in Western Pennsylvania, and two farmers in Ohio. So we're bridging
this entire region.
Ava Robinson: This year's hemp plants were much more successful. All that learning they
yielded last year apparently paid off.
Lori Daytner: Yesterday I was standing in eight foot tall hemp fields, which was thrilling. Of
course, I chose the eight foot section to stand in and take my pictures because it
was just more impressive than the six foot stuff. But, uh, so thrilling to do that
versus searching for hemp plants in a field full of weeds as we did last year.
Burgess Brown: So DON Services are partnering with local farmers, and they're beginning the
process of renovating a home with hemp lime. But as Lori said, they're also
trying to build an entire industry, which means they're exploring more than just
one end use for hemp. The thing that interests so many people about hemp is
that one plant can be grown and used for more than just one thing.
Ava Robinson: But as we've talked about before, many of hemps end uses required
decortication, which is the process of separating the long outer fibers from the
inner woody core of a hemp plant. The woody core is what is used for building
products and the long fibers are used for textiles and are currently the most
valuable part of the industrial hemp plant. Finding a high quality decorticator is
key to keeping those fibers intact.
Lori Daytner: Now you have varying degrees of what these machines are like. I mean, you
have, there are examples out there that are mobile and can be brought to the
field. And then you have equipment lines that can process 10 tons an hour. As
you would imagine, along with that, the price point is quite different. Those big
machines run around 10 to $11 million. The smaller mobile machines can run
about 130 to $150,000. The $10 million machines are the ones that can process
for the widest array of end users. It gets kind of tricky without a really
developed market to kind of understand if that kind of investment is going to
pay off in a reasonable amount of time. If textile manufacturers don't adopt
hemp into their products quickly enough, it could be quite a long wait. So that's
where the tricky part comes in. And no one has a crystal ball. Everyone says,
"Oh, it's coming, it's coming." And we all believe it's coming, but none of us can
tell you when it's going to come. It could be next month. It could be a year from
now. It could be even longer.
Burgess Brown: For most farmers, investing in any kind of decorticator is out of reach, much less
a $10 million machine. But that is where DON is stepping in with the help of
grant funding. They're planning to purchase a decorticator. The hemp industry is
still so new and therefore very risky. It needs the support of external funding.
Lori Daytner: We are not going to go in and promise farmers that, Hey, you're going to get
rich. We don't promise any numbers because it wouldn't be right to do so at this
point. However, in the year that I've been working on this, I see tremendous
momentum building. The interest from all of the typical end user applications
that you hear about: plastics, textiles, building materials, et cetera, you see
more and more and more interest. And you see companies starting to make
some progress.
Ava Robinson: Building materials are just one of many avenues DON Services and Lori are
exploring, but they're quickly becoming one of the most promising. And that's
because the type manufacturing that already happens in New Castle can be
readily transitioned into creating hemp lime building materials.
Lori Daytner: We became founding members of the US Hemp Building Association in October
of last year. And that was where I was first introduced to hemp lime. And I
thought, wow, because we have a defunct cement plant sitting down the road,
we have a few others that had to scale back their operations. So I thought, wow,
we can grow it. We have the lime. And we have trade schools right here where
we can help rejuvenate the masonry yards. So that's what we've been pursuing.
And one of the best ways to do that we believe is to do our part along with
other members of the US Hemp Building Association, to support the inclusion of
this building material in the ICC or the International Construction Code. In order
to do that, we said, okay, since we're already renovating homes, let's try to do
one with hempcrete or hemp lime, and we will do testing and see if we can't see
if we can help that goal be achieved.
Burgess Brown: Helping farmers, purchasing a decorticator, trying to create an industry and
building and renovating homes. That's where they are. This very summer, Lori
and her colleagues purchased the house they intend to renovate as a hemp
home. They'll be beginning work soon. Although the house, interestingly, isn't
completely new to them.
Lori Daytner: It's located in a section of the city that's been called the Lower East Side. That
section of the city is, you know, back in the day was called the tree streets
because the streets are Oak, Cherry, Walnut. This house happens to be on
Spruce Street. It's not a very large house. It is two stories. I think it was built in
1957. It's in quite bad shape, but it was the right size. And it was in the right
area because that is the area where we have our revitalization program going
on. Interestingly enough, one of my colleagues, Anita McKeever, lived on a
street, not far from there. And one of her good friends from school lived in that
house and grew up in that house.
Ava Robinson: The work of DON Services is deeply rooted in the local. And that's also true of
the hemp industry. They're trying to build. This season, we've been thinking a
lot about how to create a local industry based on hemp. From the work DON is
doing, it doesn't seem like something that'll just pop up naturally. Something so
new and developing needs support.
Burgess Brown: What we're curious about is: once it has that support, like the kind DON is giving
it, how far can it go in moving us away from our dependence on fossil fuels and
petrochemically based building products? We'll be watching New Castle to find
out.
Burgess Brown: Trace Material is a project of Parsons Healthy Materials Lab at the New School.
It is produced by me, Burgess Brown, Ava Robinson, and the HML team. Thank
you to Lori Daytner for lending her voice and expertise to this episode. And
thank you to Friends of Healthier Materials who make this podcast possible. Our
theme music is Rainbow Road by Cardioid. Additional music from Blue Dot
Sessions.