Kickstart: From 'Bad Boy' to hemp entrepreneur

Since winning two NBA championships as a member of the Detroit Pistons "Bad Boys" teams, Isiah Thomas had a post-playing career in management in coaching.

And now, as CEO of One World Products, a Colombia-based hemp growing company, Thomas wants to oversee the growth of a traditional plastics replacement.

"Anything that's made of plastic, if you can think 10, 15 years from now, it will be made of hemp because that's what the environment and the world are calling for," he says in an interview from the Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference in Miami, posted June 1 on YouTube.

Not only does Thomas think hemp-based materials can replace standard plastics in the auto industry — citing Henry Ford's experiments with hemp and soybean-based plastics in the late 1930s as an example — but also he says hemp can be used in every industry.

"This plant is one-stop shopping for the world right now, for the environment," he said. "When you move to packaging ... and improving your carbon footprint by replacing plastics now with hemp."

One World has a development project with Stellantis, the parent company of the Chrysler and Jeep brands, to develop hemp bioplastics for auto parts. One World currently has 650 farmers in Colombia cultivating a little more than 2,000 acres of hemp, so it probably isn't on a big industrial scale yet.

And while bioplastics have become a hot topic in the industry, not everyone understands all the differences within the types of materials that fall under that category.

In the Sustainable Plastics Live webcast earlier this week, Sustainable Plastics Editor Karen Laird said that people often use the terms "bioplastics" and "biodegradable plastics" interchangeably, but they are very different.

Bio-based plastics are materials based on renewable materials such as hemp, corn or soybeans. But only a very few of those materials are compostable, and most of those compost only in specific industrial processes, she said. A bio-based PET, for example, won't do anything to aid in reducing littering of marine pollution.

But a bio-based plastic still plays an important part in sustainability because they have a smaller carbon footprint than standard plastics by avoiding fossil fuels, so they can make a real difference on those measurements.

"A major problem [with using more bio-based plastics] is supply and availability," she added. "The majority of bio-based plastics are still a tiny fraction of what's being produced in the plastics market."

About that car Isiah Thomas mentioned, you can see it here.

In a 1940 photo, Henry Ford is caught in action, the head of an axe a blur just before it makes contact with the trunk of his own car where a steel body part was replaced with soybean-based plastic. Ford wanted to prove his bio-based plastic was sturdy.

Since then, both bioplastics and biocomposites have been used in cars already on the road, with everything from soybean oil used to produce nylon for radiator end tanks to coffee chaff replacing glass as a filler for composites.

Tire makers also are working toward bio-based materials that can be used as a latex replacement. Bridgestone has research into the shrub guayule as a source. Goodyear is looking into dandelions and announced that it is using soybean oil compound in the mix for a current commercial vehicle tire. It has set a target to fully replace petroleum sources for tires by 2040.