How hemp-based cooking bags can save lives while protecting the planet

A new initiative is turning medical cannabis waste into eco-cook bags for cleaner, healthier, more sustainable cooking.

The simple act of cooking a meal can have hazardous results. Almost three billion people—one in three—depend on fuels such as wood, charcoal and kerosene to prepare food over open flames using inefficient stoves in small, enclosed spaces.

This type of “dirty cooking” pumps out harmful fumes and planet-warming greenhouse-gas emissions and, according to the Clean Cooking Alliance, leads to four million premature deaths each year. Women and children are often the most impacted from toxic cooking techniques.

Clean cook bags are one solution that significantly reduces the time it takes to prepare a meal and helps decrease the amount of poisonous fumes associated with fossil fuelled cooking and open-flame fires. They essentially act as slow cookers to retain heat long after a pot is taken off the stove.

While these tea-cosy type bags cut down water use and energy associated with traditional cooking, they are not necessarily great for the planet as the material used for insulation is often made from petroleum-based styrofoam.

Swapping this material out for hemp-based insulation could be a game changer when it comes to clean cooking that’s also good for the environment. 

Hemp-based clean cook bags. Photo: Eternal Flame/Unyte Hemp

Swapping styrofoam for hemp

When Ken Dunn founded Eternal Flame Worldwide, the company made cooking bags from cotton and petrochemical-based insulation. Now, Eternal Flame Worldwide and Unyte Hemp have partnered to create hemp-based clean cook bags that are eco-friendly, carbon negative and that embody the principles of a circular economy.

“I said look, why don’t we make these out of hemp,” explains Jamie Bartley, CEO of Unyte Hemp.

“It’s more sustainable and can be just as scalable.” 

After initial testing, the hemp-based bags showed a better thermodynamic performance than their original petrochemical counterparts. What’s more, rather than having to grow hemp to create the bags, the company wants to tap into the (sizable) medical cannabis waste that often gets discarded or burned. 

“These bags can help reduce the waste stream from medical cannabis production which, at the moment, doesn’t have any viable alternative,” says Bartley. 

Footage of hemp farming in the UK. Photo: Unyte Hemp

The co-benefits of hemp-based cooking bags

Cleaner cooking is linked to many of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals because of what it gives back to people: time and health. Clean cooking solutions create healthier home environments for entire families, but they also inevitably help women who generally shoulder the burden of home care, childcare and cooking.

Enabling women to dedicate more time to education or personal development means they are more likely to enter the workforce and contribute to the formal economy.

According to the World Bank, US$15-30tn in unrealised lifetime productivity and earnings is lost due to barriers impeding women from completing their education.

While the social and health gains of clean cook bags are clear, adding hemp into the mix hits that sustainability sweet spot by providing additional planet-saving benefits.

“Not only are these bags reducing cook time and giving time back that can be used for business development or education, they also reduce carbon emissions,” says Bartley. 

He points to a few key reasons why hemp is the best option for clean cook bags.

“Its thermodynamic performance is far superior to most alternative insulation products and petrochemical insulations. It’s also very low energy to produce a high insulating product,” he continues.

The other big win is the carbon sequestration properties of the cannabis plant.

“Hemp fibre is carbon negative: around 1.67 kilograms of embodied carbon per kilogramme of hemp fibre,” he says.

Photo: Unyte Hemp

Bartley compares the carbon sucking power of hemp to the many carbon emissions associated with the extraction and production of fossil-fuel based petrochemicals. 

He goes on to list the additional benefits of using hemp for clean cook bags in development situations: “You can produce it locally across Africa at scale without any high intensity plumbing. It produces food as well as fibre, and [hemp bricks] can replace virgin timber [used for cooking]. And that’s all from one crop.”

Hemp also helps bolster biodiversity. When used as an intercrop—planted alongside other fruiting crops— it strengthens soil health which increases productivity of other crops that attract pollinators.

Bartley adds: “Hemp certainly has a wide food security and biodiversity impact.”

What’s next for hemp-based clean cook bags 

It’s still early days for the hemp-based bags, but next steps for the Eternal Flame Worldwide and Unyte Hemp partnership includes developing the necessary infrastructure to scale up so that anyone who needs an eco-friendly clean cook bag can get one.

A big part of this is securing funding for decortication units to process the medical cannabis waste into usable hemp fibre within the countries they’re targeting for deployment. 

“We really want to distribute on a larger level,” says Bartley.

While they eventually want to invest in large-scale decortication facilities, they will still focus on smaller decortication units to enable widespread mobile and local production of not only hemp cook bags, but of hemp logs which can be used to replace virgin timber. 

Hemp-based cook bags will be rolled out initially in Africa. Photo: Eternal Flame/Unyte Hemp

The project will likely be rolled out in Africa—they are currently targeting Lesotho and Zimbabwe as well as other African nations—but there is potential for these hemp-based clean cook bags to alleviate fuel poverty pressures brought on by the dual cost of living and energy crises impacting households in the UK.

“If you can reduce people’s need to use so much cooking fuel and instead use these bags, you’re reducing carbon and saving money and it’s still the same quality of cooking,” says Bartley. 

It could also be an opportunity for ESG-investment which supports the production of bags in the UK while helping medical cannabis companies manage their own waste streams.

“We could work with different medical cannabis producers to sponsor production of the bags,” adds Bartley.

“Then it’s a bit of an ESG story for the carbon-intensive medical space.”

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