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Seth Sommerfeld photo
Cannabis retailers say vapes create unnecessary waste, partly due to Washington’s packaging rules.
As cannabis consumers move past the 4/20 buzz, they might be noticing a byproduct of indulging in weed’s high holiday…
Trash. A bunch of trash from cannabis products and packaging.
Plastic joint tubes. Plastic edible packaging. Disposable vape products. Empty jars. At a certain point, it begins to pile up in a way that’s actually calculable.
“Every cannabis sale in Washington state is public knowledge, right?” says Mitchell Dunn, the assistant manager at Lucky Leaf Co. in Spokane, who is passionate about reducing cannabis waste. “So I could easily, for the last five years, go back and see what the sales for these cannabis companies were. Tell you what product they were using, if they were using a plastic bag or a jar or a plastic tube or what. It’d be very easy to calculate how much waste is really going out there.”
While states with legalized cannabis must follow regulations to comply with the federal Poison Prevention Packaging Act to keep products out of the hands of children, Washington is strict in a way that leads to more trash.
Washington’s Liquor and Cannabis Board requires packaging be made of plastic at least 2 mil (two thousandths of an inch) thick. As an example, Wyld gummies in Washington come in a strip, each individually wrapped in plastic, while the same product in California just comes in a little plastic tub with the gummies loose inside it.
Seth Sommerfeld photo
This level of garbage is easy to deal with as an individual, but with millions of sales of cannabis products, it begins to societally add up.
There are many different ways cannabis waste can be tricky. Dunn cites single-use disposable vape pens as the most problematic.
“There is no plan for them,” he says. “You’re not even supposed to throw them away. And statistically speaking, 25% of our customers are looking for a disposable.”
Single-use vapes are not supposed to be thrown away as normal trash because they contain batteries that could become toxic and/or catch on fire. But since nobody wants a pile of used vapes around and most don’t know the method to take them to dumps’ hazardous waste disposal areas, they usually get tossed out.
While the issue probably needs to be addressed on a legislative level, Dunn is hoping that the cannabis industry can at least take baby steps to fix some of the problems, even if it’s as simple as starting with weed jar recycling programs. Knowing that cannabis consumers tend to be more eco-friendly folks makes it seem like an obvious problem area to address.
“I look at our future and my boys and our legacy,” Dunn says. “And it’s like, I know, there’s lots of business opportunities you could take, but what can you really do that impacts your community?”
“}]] As cannabis consumers move past the 4/20 buzz, they might be noticing a byproduct of indulging in weed’s high holiday… Trash. A bunch of trash… Read More
