A Legal Pot Problem That’s Now Plaguing the Streets of America: Plastic Litter
James Bruggers | September 27, 2022 | Inside Climate News
Waste packaging from a burgeoning and newly legalized marijuana industry litters streets across the country, adding to a global crisis of plastic waste.
In New York, regulators who are making the state’s first-ever rules for the retail sale of recreational marijuana hope they have answers to limit their state’s contribution to the problem. They’ve been working to include sustainable packaging requirements into the licenses that businesses will need to open by the end of this year.
However, at least one prominent environmental advocate fears New York—and other states grappling with a new and booming industry—aren’t requiring enough producer responsibility for the environmental impacts of their products.
Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, a group working to end plastics waste, said the best time for a nascent industry to bake in sustainability principles is when it’s just getting established—and for legalized cannabis sales, she added, that means now.
“When states approve recreational use of marijuana, they should create environmental standards for packaging, otherwise, we’re going to have this entire new universe of plastic waste of the worst kind,” said Enck, a former regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“It’s small, it’ll get littered on city streets, and very likely get washed into storm drains, and then into streams in the ocean,” said Enck, who got her start in environmental advocacy successfully lobbying for New York’s state’s 1982 Returnable Container Act, known as the bottle bill. “There are alternatives to plastics, but the companies selling the product will probably just go for the cheapest packaging they can find, which is plastic.”
Marijuana in medical dispensaries or retail stores is sold in many forms, including cigarettes, oils, resins or as edible products like brownies, cookies or gummies. And plastic litter in the form of “doob tubes,” Mylar or other plastic sachets or pouches and spent cannabis oil vape cartridges made of plastic are already getting kicked to the curb in cities where marijuana sales are legal, environmental advocates and industry insiders said. It’s happening even in New York City, from already existing illegal retail outlets that follow no rules.
An industry-wide discussion on pot and plastic is happening at a pivotal time. Earlier this year, 175 countries including the United States coalesced around an urgent need and began working toward a global United Nations treaty to curtail plastic waste. U.N. officials have described the global plastics problem as part of a “triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature loss and pollution.”
The cannabis industry itself recognizes the problem, said Derek Thomas, a former marketing and advertising committee member of the National Cannabis Industry Association, and the chief growth officer of a company, AE Global, that sells packaging to the cannabis industry.
“We work with a number of the largest, medium and smaller-sized growers and brands … around the country, and what is encouraging is the vast majority of them identify the huge waste issue within the cannabis industry,” Thomas said. “Everybody is looking for solutions that not only make us and the consumer feel better, but also have impact and integrity behind them.”
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