Legal cannabis has a plastic problem

Buy a few grams of legal flower and you’ll notice something: the packaging often weighs more than the cannabis. Behind the child-resistant tins and pop-top bottles is a real waste problem, and Canada is only starting to deal with it.

A lot of plastic for a little flower

Legal cannabis is heavily packaged by design. One figure that gets quoted a lot captures it well: 3.5 grams of flower can come with up to 78 grams of plastic. Multiply that across a whole country, and it adds up fast. In the first year of legalization, reporting suggested more than 6 million kilograms of cannabis packaging ended up in landfills.

That’s a small slice of Canada’s total plastic problem (the country produces over 3 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, and less than 10 percent gets recycled), but it’s a fast-growing and very visible one.

Why the packaging is so heavy

It isn’t producers being wasteful for no reason. Health Canada’s rules require cannabis to be child-resistant, plain, tamper-evident, and carry an excise stamp and detailed labelling. Those rules exist for good reasons, chiefly keeping products away from kids. The side effect is packaging built from thick, often mixed materials that curbside recycling systems struggle with, plus lots of small items that slip through the sorting machines.

What’s being done about it

The industry is starting to respond, mostly through voluntary programs:

• Take-back recycling. TerraCycle runs a cannabis-container program (backed by Canopy Growth’s Tweed brand) that accepts empty packaging collected through licensed retailers across the country.
• Grassroots collection. Smaller efforts, like the Purple Bin program, gather empties directly from shops and customers.
• Producer responsibility rules. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) requirements are slowly pushing companies to own the waste their packaging creates.

None of this fully solves it yet, but the direction is set.

What it means for you

You can keep more of this out of the landfill without much effort:

• Don’t just toss the tin. Ask your store whether it takes back empty cannabis packaging for recycling. Many licensed retailers act as TerraCycle drop-off points.
• Buy in larger sizes when it makes sense. More grams per package means less plastic per gram.
• Reuse the containers. Those airtight tins and jars are genuinely good for storing cannabis, and reusing one beats recycling it.

Sources

• The Globe and Mail, Why the cannabis industry must address the plastics problem
• StratCann, The cannabis industry’s role in Canada’s waste crisis
• StratCann, The current status of recycling cannabis waste