‘Outdated’ Marijuana Packaging Rules Make It ‘Impossible’ For Cannabis Industry To Be Environmentally Sustainable, Study Says

A newly published study of product packaging from the commercial marijuana industry concludes that the market shift toward vape pens in recent years has been “a seismic event for cannabis waste,” with packaging from California’s legal market now nearly on par with that of household pharmaceuticals in the state.

But while there’s “a robust infrastructure in place for reverse distribution” of pharmaceuticals, the study notes, “no such infrastructure exists for cannabis waste at large scale.”

The new research, by Oaksterdam University researcher Mitchell Colbert, published this week in the standards organization ATSM International’s Journal of Testing and Evaluation, also highlights how state cannabis regulations contribute to excessive cannabis waste that doesn’t exist for other industries.

The paper describes itself as “a novel attempt to estimate the volume of cannabis consumer packaging waste produced in California each year…and compare it with other household hazardous waste (HHW).”

It notes that while California regulators collected waste data through the state’s track-and-trace program, that information “is not publicly available even with a state Public Records Act request to the [Department of Cannabis Control].” Instead the study looked at a sample of cannabis packaging of 256 California cannabis products from 138 manufacturers, combining those findings with sales data on the number of product units sold.

“Cannabis waste is a larger waste stream than previously known.”

Notably, the paper examined only consumer packaging waste, not all waste associated with the production of the product.

“In 2022,” the review found, “California had a consumer cannabis packaging waste stream almost as large as the 16,805 US tons (15,245,240 kilograms) of HHW pharmaceuticals produced in California in 2021.”

“Despite rules around cannabis waste being ambiguous, many businesses do not engage in the collection of cannabis waste for recycling and other sustainable practices in California,” it continues. “Regulations must be changed by state regulators to allow cannabis licensees to have better waste management options, which will result in less environmental contamination, and thus, cleaner cannabis.”

A meaningful shift in packaging waste has taken place since the COVID pandemic and the spate of vaping-related lung injuries beginning in 2019 that most have attributed to the use of a single cutting agent found predominantly in unregulated vape cartridges, the study says. While smoking was once the leading form of consumption, sales data from 2018 to 2022 “show that less than 50 % of sales were for cannabis flower in California, with similar findings in many other states.”

Consumers are turning increasingly to vapes—what the paper refers to as electronic cannabis delivery systems [EDCSs]—as well as edibles, tinctures and topicals.

“These other methods of consumption have created new and diverse waste streams, further complicated by regulations requiring child-resistant packaging (CRP), universal symbols, warning labels, and all manner of other strict requirements,” the paper says. “These regulations have resulted in larger cannabis packages than before legalization, and far more packaging waste, compounded by changed consumer buying patterns and business decisions about packaging.”

“Unless regulators and legislators amend laws to allow cannabis companies to package their products and recycle their waste like all other [fast moving consumer goods] industries, a truly sustainable cannabis industry will remain impossible,” Colbert writes.

“Even companies who wish to be more sustainable cannot always use less packaging and remain legally compliant.”

On top of that, the paper says, “outdated cannabis regulations, largely written for a time when waste was primarily flower, prerolls, and edibles, frequently do not mention ECDS devices and their battery waste.”

The inclusion of a lithium-ion battery in vape devices raises particular issues, as disposal of those devices is governed by federal regulations.

“The concern for cannabis businesses is that federal regulations on hazardous waste, such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), appear to define ECDS products as hazardous waste because of their inclusion of a lithium-ion battery, which means they cannot go into household garbage or recycling bins and definitely should not be ground up and taken to the landfill,” the review says. “This puts cannabis operators in a Catch-22, in which they must either comply with state cannabis disposal rules or with broader rules governing the disposal of hazardous and universal wastes at the local, state, and federal level.”

The review’s findings show that marijuana packaging waste “is a larger waste stream than previously known,” it says, “on par with or larger than many common HHW streams with robust collection and recycling systems in place, yet cannabis waste lacks the infrastructure and institutional support given to motor oil and other HHW recycling.”

“Although it has been known for years that there is a cannabis waste problem in many states with large consumer or medical markets, so far no one has attempted to create an estimated weight total for a state to compare with other known waste streams,” the paper continues. “Now, there is an estimated size and scope of the solid waste problems in California’s cannabis industry so that regulators and businesses can begin to intelligently create solutions to those problems rather than make policy decisions in the dark.”

Colbert calls on regulators to pass “thoughtful regulations grounded in solid environmental policy matters, because if they do not, they can exacerbate environmental harms rather than mitigate them.”

Revised packaging-related rules in California aimed at child-resistance other policy goals were well intentioned, the paper says, but “still appear to have contributed to a 37 % increase in the volume of cannabis packaging waste from 2017 to 2018 and 60 % more packaging waste in 2022 than if packaging weights stayed the same as in the days pre-regulation.”

Further, states should make more concerted efforts to collect and make public data around packaging waste collected by track-and-trace systems, the study advises.

“It is impossible to know how big this problem is and what can be done about it if no one is looking at the data,” it says.

Future research should also look at consumer packaging of hemp products, Colbert writes, which was omitted from the new paper because the sample size of packages was deemed too small to be robust.

Meanwhile, as for the environmental burdens of producing raw cannabis, a study earlier this summer found that growing plants outside can drastically reduce environmental impacts compared to indoor production—lessening greenhouse gas emissions, soil acidification and the pollution of local waterways.

“Results show that outdoor cannabis agriculture can be 50 times less carbon-emitting than indoor production,” said that study, published in the journal Agricultural Science and Technology. “Dissemination of this knowledge is of utmost importance for producers, consumers, and government officials in nations that have either legalized or will legalize cannabis production.”

Though the environmental impacts of cannabis production are often overlooked by policymakers, industry and consumers alike, some bodies have stepped up efforts to lessen the market’s footprint.

In Colorado last year, for example, officials launched a program to fund the cannabis industry’s energy efficiency, pointing to a 2018 report from the state’s energy office finding that cannabis cultivation comprised 2 percent of the state’s total energy use. Electricity was pricey for growers too, the report found, eating up roughly a third of cultivators’ operating budgets.

In 2020, Colorado launched a more experimental program aimed at using cannabis cultivation to capture carbon from another regulated industry: alcohol. The state Carbon Dioxide Reuse Program Pilot Project involved capturing carbon dioxide emitted during beer brewing and using the gas to stimulate marijuana growth.

A report from the International Coalition on Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Justice last year, meanwhile, drew attention to the negative impacts of unregulated drug production in areas like the Amazon Rainforest and the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Attempts to protect those critical ecosystems, the report warned, “will fail as long as those committed to environmental protection neglect to recognize, and grapple with, the elephant in the room”—namely “the global system of criminalized drug prohibition, popularly known as the ‘war on drugs.’”

Two years ago, meanwhile, a pair of U.S. congressmen who oppose legalization pushed the Biden administration to study the environmental impacts of marijuana cultivation, writing that they had “reservations regarding marijuana cultivation’s subsequent emissions and believe more research is needed on this industry’s rapidly growing demands on our country’s energy systems, along with its effects on our environment.”

In an interview with Marijuana Moment at the time, pro-legalization Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA) said that “there are some important nuances” when it comes to cannabis policy and the environment.

He said that, even amid extreme drought conditions in California, there are water sources that should be providing resources to the community and industry that are instead being diverted by illicit growers.

“We have not done a very good job of lifting up the legal market so that we can eliminate the black market—and that black market has really unacceptable environmental impacts,” he said at the time.

California itself has taken some specific steps to ameliorate the issue. For example, officials announced in 2021 that they were soliciting concept proposals for a marijuana tax-funded program aimed at helping small cannabis cultivators with environmental clean-up and restoration efforts.

The following year, California awarded $1.7 in grant money to sustainable cannabis growers, part of a planned $6 million in total funding.

And in New York, set rules meant to promote environmental awareness, for example by requiring businesses to submit an environmental sustainability program and explore the possibility of reusing cannabis packaging. Lawmakers there also explored promoting industry recycling programs and cannabis packaging made from hemp rather than synthetic plastics, though neither proposal was enacted.

Medical Marijuana Was On The Ballot In Over 100 Kentucky Cities And Counties. It Passed In Every Single Place