Our Sustainability Commitment

Today’s cannabis industry has some major waste problems. For starters, did you know …?

• The U.S. state of Washington’s legal cannabis industry produced 1.7 million pounds of plant waste between 2014, when cannabis cultivation was first legalized there, and 2017. Three years later, with medical and/or legal cannabis having been legalized in another 34 states, the amount of plant waste in the U.S. alone has grown to millions of pounds per year – and most of it is being sent to landfills. (Plant waste includes stalks, roots and other plant parts not used in production and left over from processing).
• Indoor cannabis cultivation facilities are one of the most energy-intensive business sectors. One 2012 study suggests that, from a consumer vantage point, the energy use for growing a one 1-gram “joint” creates 10 pounds of carbon dioxide pollution, equivalent to running ten 10-watt LED light bulbs (or one 100-watt incandescent bulb) for 76 hours. Embedded in each average indoor-grown plant is the energy equivalent of 70 gallons of oil. A small “grow house” with ten grow lights consumes approximately as much electricity as 10 average U.S. homes.
• According to a 2018 Canadian media report, for every gram of cannabis sold, there can be as much as 70 grams of packaging waste, much of it plastics. U.S.-based hemp packaging manufacturer Sana Packaging estimates that more than one billion units of single-use cannabis plastic packaging will be discarded in North America in 2020.