The European Commission published new guidance this year putting “whole-life carbon” at the centre of EU building policy — a shift from measuring only the energy a building uses once occupied to counting the carbon cost of the materials that went into it, and the waste created when it eventually comes down. It’s the kind of document that reads as procedural. That is, according to Evgeny Skigin, an industrial hemp entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience, until you understand what it actually changes. What it changes, he argues, is which materials get specified in the first place.
“When legislation and the economy are pushing in a certain direction, as a young entrepreneur, you have to look at the future — not what’s there now, but what the future is going to be,” Skigin says, describing the instinct that led him into hemp in 2008. It’s the same instinct, he argues, that should now guide how the construction industry reads Brussels’ new accounting rules.
Half the problem was never on the energy bill
The Commission’s own figures explain the stakes. About half of all EU greenhouse gas emissions are linked to the building stock, and the sector generates the largest waste stream in Europe. For years, Skigin notes, “green building” has mostly meant operational efficiency — insulation, windows, heating systems — which measures only the energy used after a building opens. It says nothing about the carbon locked into concrete and steel before a single occupant moves in.
Whole-life carbon accounting closes that gap by measuring emissions across a building’s entire life cycle: design, construction, use, renovation, and demolition. The guidance leans towards reusing existing buildings and reducing demand for new material — both of which eventually raise the same question every builder has to answer, in Skigin’s view: what should that material actually be?
Why hemp fits a test it wasn’t designed to pass
Skigin’s answer draws on the material he has spent nearly two decades working with. Hemp fibre and hemp hurd — the woody core of the plant — go into insulation and, mixed with a lime binder, into hempcrete. The case for it under whole-life accounting is straightforward, he says: the plant absorbs carbon as it grows, and much of that carbon stays locked into the walls for the building’s life, in direct contrast to concrete and steel, which emit carbon in production before construction even begins.
Skigin is careful not to overstate the connection. The Commission’s guidance doesn’t name bio-based materials specifically. But the accounting logic, he argues, does the work regardless: once embodied carbon is what’s being measured, a material that sequesters carbon during growth stops being a niche choice and becomes a rational one on the numbers.
Part of what makes hemp a strong candidate, in his telling, is how little it demands to grow. “It’s basically a weed,” he says. “It doesn’t need pesticides or herbicides. It doesn’t require a lot of water. It has a very deep root system. It can grow in Finland and it can grow in Thailand.” From a single crop, he notes, come fibre for textiles, hurds for construction, and seed with a strong protein and fat profile — “textiles, housing, and food” from one plant.
The old obstacle hasn’t disappeared
None of that means hempcrete shows up on job sites next year, and Skigin is blunt about why. “No builder understands what hemp is, no architect understands what it is, and the client in the end also doesn’t quite understand it,” he says. “Even if he wants it, he’ll still go with the safe option.” His own venture had to fly builders to the Netherlands to learn the technique before a single wall could go up correctly — the unglamorous cost, he says, of introducing a new material into a chain built around the old ones.
What changes with guidance like this, in his view, is the incentive on the demand side. Once whole-life carbon becomes what gets measured — and eventually regulated — buyers start asking for exactly the properties a bio-based material already has. It’s a variation on an argument Skigin has made for years about hemp’s path to scale: no industry, he says, “has ever succeeded without government support. Not the internet, not oil, not trains, not cars.” Materials, in his reasoning, are no exception.
He points to the Netherlands, where his venture built what he describes as the world’s only prefabricated hemp building production line, and where government subsidies and grants have begun closing the cost gap with traditional materials — including supplying materials for a museum project in Eindhoven. “That has now changed in the Netherlands,” he says. “It should really be EU-wide.”
Whole-life carbon accounting, in Skigin’s reading, is the tool that finally makes hemp’s case in numbers a finance department has to take seriously, rather than a sustainability slide a builder can set aside. Europe just decided to count all the carbon in its buildings, not only the part on the electricity bill. What gets built next, he argues, depends on which materials are ready when that accounting starts to bite.
