Is there anything hemp can’t do? A year after hemp became legal to grow in the United States, we’ve seen its power to makebetter clothing,better buildingsandbetter medicine.

Now, there’s something else hemp appears to be better at – making batteries.

Most auto batteries today are made from lithium-ion, an expensive, quickly disappearing material.

A team of American and Canadian researchers have developed a battery that could be used in cars and power tools using hemp bast fiber – the inner bark of the plant that usually ends up in landfill.

They “cooked” the woody pulp and processed them into carbon nanosheets, which they used to build supercapacitors “on a par with or better than graphene” – the industry gold standard.

Graphene is a synthetic carbon material lighter than foil yet bulletproof, but it is prohibitively expensive to make.

“People ask me: why hemp? I…