Legal weed packaging is wrecking the planet. What are we going to do about it?
By Mark Hay | 4/19/21 | Mic
American popular culture has long conflated cannabis with crunchy-munchy environmentalism, thanks to the role counterculture groups played in advancing the visibility of, and public dialogue around, both illicit substances and eco-consciousness from the mid-20th century on. Even as pot has escaped that subcultural niche, growing into an increasingly broad, professionalized industry over the last 25 years of gradual and piecemeal legalization, this heritage can still influence the kind of people who decide to get into the legal weed space, and the decisions they make. Overall, argues James Eichner of Sana, a legal pot packaging firm, “cannabis is an industry that skews progressive, and that wants to do well with respect to its impacts on the environment.”
That’s why I, like many other cannabis consumers, find it so odd — jarring even — that legal weed often comes wrapped in excessive amounts of plastic, a notoriously environmentally unfriendly substance. No agencies or watchdogs track the industry’s plastic use in detail yet. But one analysis in the U.S. found that a sample of cannabis products used plastic packaging weighing four to 30 times their contents. Another investigation in Canada found that a gram of weed can come in up to 70 grams of plastic. That’s more plastic per unit of product than most other licit industries use — and a lot more plastic per nug, joint, or gummy than the tiny, lightweight dime bags most small, neighborhood black market dealers have historically used.
American industry insiders say they sell over a billion units of product every year, which likely translates to thousands of tons of plastic packaging. Most of that is single-use plastic, designed to be discarded after it’s opened and emptied; the vast majority of it ends up as litter or in a landfill, even if it was placed in a recycling bin. And as the industry inevitably grows exponentially with the continued march of legalization across the country, plastics makers believe they stand to make bank on what some of them have already dubbed a green rush. All of which deeply concerns people like Judith Enck, an Obama-era EPA administrator who now runs Beyond Plastics, a pollution elimination project. “This is a major new universe of plastic waste,” she stresses.