When South African mining conglomerate Afrimat teamed up with legacy hemp company Hemporium to refashion a building in Cape Town with hemp building blocks, the story got more play than Henry Ford’s so-called hemp car.
We know. We watch these things. Rather, we’ve employed some robots to watch them: social media likes & shares; hashtags, monitor mentions, impressions, reach, sessions, users. Metrics, metrics, metrics.
Afrimat’s original press release showed up in business media channels such as Engineering News, B2B Central, Business Tech, South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, and even Voice of America picked up the story as did a couple dozen local media outlets downstream. Travel Noire thought it worthy. Linked-In and Facebook went nuts with likes, shares and comments.
Object lesson
It’s an object lesson in good business communications, a rare one for industrial hemp. The building project, combined with Afrimat’s development of hemp-lime block technology, and special binders, demonstrates a sincere attempt to contribute to environmentally conscious industry. It makes the promise of sustainable building with hemp look serious.
In addition to its industrial hemp venture, Afrimat has developed sustainability initiatives in renewable energy, waste management, environmental rehabilitation, and water conservation. The company is investing in solar energy to reduce reliance on coal, optimizing mining processes to lower CO₂ emissions, and recycling mining by-products to minimize waste.
Afrimat also has projects in reforestation of mined-out areas, and has implemented water treatment technologies to conserve water and prevent contamination.
Coin flip
Flip the coin over: Despite Afrimat’s venture in hemp and the company’s emerging image as a player in sustainability, that’s all in stark contrast to its core mining operations – for lime, iron ore, anthracite, and manganese – prime polluters that cause significant harm through carbon emissions, habitat destruction, air and water pollution, and the release of toxic substances like sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and methane.
Flip it over again: Afrimat’s efforts in industrial hemp reflect an unavoidable truth: large-scale corporations with the financial capacity, resources, and infrastructure are needed to invest in and drive innovation in sustainable industries. The scale of Afrimat’s operations allows it to invest in cutting-edge technologies and hemp-based materials and to shout about those investments – usually out of reach for smaller, less-capitalized players.
Hypocritical? Not necessarily. Hemp can lead to change, but change in business always comes step-by-step, and requires backing from powerful voices to gain widespread acceptance. Those voices can sometimes come from unexpected places.
The upper floors of the building, which was renovated with hemp blocks, are hotel rooms.
Hemporium has a retail outlet in the mixed-use building at 84 Harrington Street.