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Hemp Fibres ‘Better Than Graphene’: What a 2014 Discovery Still Means for South Africa’s Green Economy
Original source:
BBC News – “Hemp fibres ‘better than graphene’”
Published 13 August 2014, by James Morgan
In August 2014, researchers presented work that should have shifted how the world looks at industrial hemp. Dr David Mitlin and his team showed that the waste bast fibre left over after hemp is processed for textiles or building materials could be transformed into carbon nanosheets. Those sheets, when fabricated into electrodes for supercapacitors, performed on par with or better than graphene — the material then being hailed as a technological miracle — at roughly one-thousandth of the cost.
More than a decade later the science still stands. What has changed is the context in which South Africa must decide whether it will treat hemp as a serious industrial feedstock or continue to undervalue one of its most versatile crops.
The Core Finding
Supercapacitors store and release energy far more rapidly than conventional batteries. They are already used in regenerative braking systems, power tools and applications that need sharp bursts of power. High surface-area electrodes are essential for performance. Graphene delivers that surface area, but producing it at scale remains expensive.
Mitlin’s group took hemp bast fibre — the inner bark that often ends up as low-value waste or landfill — and subjected it to hydrothermal synthesis, essentially a controlled pressure-cooking process. After dissolving lignin and hemicellulose, what remained were carbon nanosheets with a pseudo-graphene structure. Fabricated into electrodes and paired with an ionic liquid electrolyte, the devices delivered impressive energy and power densities across a wide temperature range, including solid performance at 0 °C and elevated temperatures relevant to industrial use.
The economic argument was blunt. Graphene-class performance from a feedstock that farmers and processors were sometimes paying to dispose of. Mitlin’s own words captured the opportunity: “We’re making graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price — and we’re doing it with waste.”
Why the Result Still Matters in 2026
South Africa is currently trying to build a hemp sector. Permits have been issued in significant numbers, the THC threshold for industrial hemp has been raised to 2 %, and local breeding work is under way to develop varieties suited to domestic conditions. At the same time, new field data from KwaZulu-Natal has quantified the crop’s water use, reminding policymakers that expansion must be planned against real resource constraints.
Into this mixed picture the 2014 supercapacitor work drops a simple question: are we treating hemp as a full-value industrial plant, or only as a fibre and seed crop with limited downstream ambition?
If the bast fibre can become high-performance carbon for energy storage, then every hectare of hemp carries multiple potential revenue streams — fibre for textiles and construction, seed for food and oil, and residual biomass for advanced materials. That changes the economics for farmers, processors and investors. It also changes the environmental calculus. Turning agricultural waste into devices that support electric mobility and grid stabilisation is a textbook circular-economy move.
From Laboratory to Possibility
Mitlin’s team was careful. They did not claim hemp nanosheets could replace graphene in every application. They showed that for energy storage the performance was competitive and the cost structure radically different. A start-up was formed to pursue early markets, particularly in oil and gas environments where high-temperature operation is valuable.
The broader lesson is about feedstock intelligence. Different plant wastes suit different devices. Banana peels lent themselves to sodium-ion battery carbons; hemp’s sheet-forming tendency suited supercapacitors. South African researchers and engineers now have a decade of global literature to draw on, plus the country’s own growing experience with hemp cultivation. The missing pieces are coordinated applied research, pilot-scale processing capacity, and policy that rewards value addition rather than raw commodity export.
Links to South Africa’s Current Debates
Several threads from recent coverage converge here.
Water-use data from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Rhodes University showed that a commercial hemp crop in the Midlands used the equivalent of 377 mm over four months. That figure is not a reason to abandon the crop; it is a reason to maximise the value extracted from every litre of water and every hectare of land. High-value applications such as energy-storage carbons improve the return on that water investment.
The medical-cannabis export track has demonstrated that South Africa can meet demanding international standards and attract serious capital. The same discipline — quality systems, traceability, skilled technical employment — will be required if hemp-derived advanced materials are to move beyond laboratory curiosity.
Traditional and small-scale growers remain largely outside formal value chains. An industrial strategy that creates processing demand for bast fibre could, if deliberately designed, open new offtake opportunities for a wider range of producers. Without that design, the benefits will again concentrate among those already able to meet high capital and compliance thresholds.
Finally, the cultural and rights-based conversation — visible in the ongoing Prince litigation, the Earthdance partnership with Fields of Green for ALL, and the persistent calls for inclusive commercialisation — reminds us that technical success alone does not deliver social legitimacy. A hemp economy that generates advanced materials while still excluding the communities historically linked to the plant will reproduce the same legitimacy deficit that already dogs the high-THC sector.
Practical Next Steps
Several concrete moves would help translate the 2014 insight into South African advantage:
• Support pilot projects that take local bast fibre through carbonisation and electrode fabrication, measuring performance against imported graphene benchmarks.
• Link hemp permit conditions and support programmes to value-addition commitments rather than cultivation alone.
• Encourage collaboration between agricultural researchers, materials scientists and the energy-storage sector.
• Treat residual biomass as a strategic resource in the same way fibre and seed are now treated.
• Ensure that small and medium enterprises, including those linked to traditional growing regions, can participate in the processing tiers rather than remaining stuck at primary production.
None of these steps requires South Africa to become a graphene-substitute superpower overnight. They require the country to stop leaving high-value applications on the table while debating whether hemp is worth growing at all.
A Longer View
Graphene itself has not disappeared. It remains an extraordinary material with applications that hemp carbons may never touch. That is not the point. The point is that a crop already being positioned as part of South Africa’s agricultural and industrial diversification possesses, in its waste stream, a pathway into the advanced materials economy. The science has been on the public record since 2014. The agronomy is advancing. The policy framework for industrial hemp is partially in place.
What remains is the decision to treat the plant as a multi-output industrial feedstock rather than a single-purpose curiosity. In a country that needs jobs, export diversification, and lower-carbon technologies, that decision should not be difficult.
The fibres that were once an inconvenience can store energy. The question is whether South Africa will store the insight — or let another decade pass before acting on it.
