The Rocky Mountain Hemp Project is a non-profit organization bringing awareness of hemp and its uses, and our goal is to bring change to the world to fight climate change by focusing on some of our largest greenhouse contributors. Using alternative natural resources, our goal is to replace paper and plastic waste starting with Colorado by 2025. We need 124,632 signatures to be considered a ballot initiative.

The U.S. alone uses approximately 68 million trees each year to produce paper and paper products (The Paperless Project, 2014), and produces more than 42m metric tons of plastic waste a year. One acre of hemp could replace as much paper as four to ten acres of trees over a 20-year cycle. 

In 1 year a mature tree will absorb more than 48 pounds of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and release oxygen in exchange. The production and incineration of plastic will add more than 850 million metric tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Logging and producing plastics are some of the main contributors to greenhouse gasses.

On average, you can plant anywhere from 300-800 trees per acre. Or you can grow roughly 1,500 to 3,000 hemp plants per acre. Farming hemp is quicker, more profitable, and is able to be mass harvested in smaller acres than trees.

Since 1980, the U.S. has sustained 258 weather and climate disasters where the overall damage costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including adjustments based on the Consumer Price Index, as of January 2020). The cumulative cost for these 258 events exceeds $1.75 trillion.

Colorado has not done enough to attempt to cease our contributions to climate change and disaster. In fact, Colorado's statewide recycling rate dropped in 2019 to 15.9%, down from 17.2% in 2018. Colorado continues to lag far behind the national recycling rate of 35% and behind our goal to reach 28% diversion by 2021. 

If Colorado truly wants to be a sustainable, eco-friendly state, we need to focus on our largest production of greenhouse gasses and waste issues - plastic and paper.

RMHP is a non-profit organization advocating hemp replacing paper with the goal of becoming a ballot initiative by 2025.