Shives, also known as shoves, boon or hurd, are the wooden refuse removed during processing

flax Flax, also known as common flax or linseed, is a flowering plant, ''Linum usitatissimum'', in the family Linaceae. It is cultivated as a food and fiber crop in regions of the world with temperate climates. Textiles made from flax are known in ...

hemp Hemp, or industrial hemp, is a botanical class of ''Cannabis sativa'' cultivars grown specifically for industrial or medicinal use. It can be used to make a wide range of products. Along with bamboo, hemp is among the fastest growing plants o ...

, or

jute Jute is a long, soft, shiny bast fiber that can be spun into coarse, strong threads. It is produced from flowering plants in the genus ''Corchorus'', which is in the mallow family Malvaceae. The primary source of the fiber is ''Corchorus olit ...

, as opposed to the fibres (

tow Towing is coupling two or more objects together so that they may be pulled by a designated power source or sources. The towing source may be a motorized land vehicle, vessel, animal, or human, and the load being anything that can be pulled. Th ...

). Shives consist of "the woody inner portion of the hemp stalk, broken into pieces and separated from the fiber in the processes of breaking and scutching" and "correspond to the shives in flax, but are coarser and usually softer in texture". Shives are a by-product of fiber production.

Decortication

Decortication separates bast fiber from the shive. The fine bast fiber is used to make textiles. Decortication is accomplished by manually crushing, a labor-intensive process, or by a hemp decorticator machine.

Uses

Shives can be used as stock in

papermaking Papermaking is the manufacture of paper and cardboard, which are used widely for printing, writing, and packaging, among many other purposes. Today almost all paper is made using industrial machinery, while handmade paper survives as a speciali ...

;

particleboard Particle board, also known as chipboard or low-density fiberboard, is an engineered wood product manufactured from wood chips and a synthetic resin or other suitable binder, which is pressed and extruded. Particle board is often confused with ori ...

hempcrete Hempcrete or hemplime is biocomposite material, a mixture of hemp hurds ( shives) and lime, sand, or pozzolans, which is used as a material for construction and insulation. It is marketed under names like Hempcrete, Canobiote, Canosmose, Isochan ...

, and other construction composites; or bedding for animals, particularly in horse stalls, which is the most common use (by weight) in Europe.

Development of water-repellent coatings

Hemp shives are a renewable organic raw material used for the production of insulation boards. The use of biomaterials for insulation boards in walls is attracting increasing interest, but wider acceptance in the construction industry has so far been slowed-down by adverse material properties. Because such materials consist mainly of cellulose, they are flammable and their hydrophilic surface leads to high water uptake, which can lead to mold or rot.Atif Hussain, Juliana Calabria-Holley, Diane Schorr, Yunhong Jiang, Mike Lawrence and Pierre Blanchet
Hydrophobicity of hemp shiv treated with sol-gel coatings.
In: ''Applied Surface Science''. Volume 434, 15 March 2018, pp. 850–860. . Therefore, engineering studies have investigated whether a coating with a water-repellent thin film provides the desired benefits. For the hydrophobic coating with silica particles, a

colloid A colloid is a mixture in which one substance consisting of microscopically dispersed insoluble particles is suspended throughout another substance. Some definitions specify that the particles must be dispersed in a liquid, while others extend ...

al sol-gel

dispersion Dispersion may refer to: Economics and finance *Dispersion (finance), a measure for the statistical distribution of portfolio returns *Price dispersion, a variation in prices across sellers of the same item *Wage dispersion, the amount of variatio ...

was successfully synthesized by the Stöber process, characterized and deposited on hemp shive. These samples passed a 72-hour test in the humidity chamber without loss of their hydrophobic property and no signs of mold growth. When hemp shive was coated several times with functionalized silica particles, uniform and complete coverage of the surface was achieved. The treatment provided the hemp shive with comprehensive water repellency: the hydrophilic character of the untreated hemp shive was modified to durably hydrophobic, once the bio-materials were coated with functionalised silica particles. Mould growth was delayed during exposure to humidity, whilst the liquid water repellent property of the treated hemp shive was maintained despite the humid conditions. The treatment developed in this study could be a viable solution for use on bio-materials that need to repel liquid water, whilst preserving the integrity of the insulation panel in common environmental conditions. There are of course still further tests to be carried out before adopting this treatment in the construction sector, such as additional moisture, mechanical, and biodegradation tests. However, the promising results described here give a good first assessment of feasibility. Before being fully adopted in the construction sector, these treatments and materials must be fully tested in accordance with the building codes. In addition, with the recent use of biomaterials, new standards and test methods for these specific materials should be developed.

References

Citations

General sources

* * * * * * * *

External links

* {{Commons category inline, Hemp shives Biofuels Fiber plants Hemp Hemp products Herbs Non-food crops