[Canniseur: All dispensaries should follow suit. We, as a people, need to step up and reduce our carbon footprint. So glad someone is leading the way. Let’s all do our part to take Maryam Mirnateghi’s recycling program to our own local dispensary.]
Whenever anyone buys legal weed at a licensed pot shop, their products are packaged in plastic. Whether it’s bottles, boxes, syringes, vape carts, or products wrapped in plastic, these packages ultimately end up in landfills, which contribute to a whole host of environmental problems.
Now, a dispensary owner in Washington State, who manages Canna West Seattle and Canna Culture Shop, believes she has a solution: Start a recycling program for weed packaging, where consumers can return their plastic waste at the very same place they purchased it.
“It is estimated that by the year 2020, there will be over one billion pieces of cannabis packaging created in the cannabis industry every year,” said Maryam Mirnateghi, the owner of the two aforementioned dispensaries, to a local NBC News affiliate.
“Sometimes it’s hard to know which items can go in which categories, so we just wanted to make it really easy for people,” she continued. “We are really hoping to create a better connection between the cannabis industry and the environment in general.”
Currently, the world produces 300 million tons of plastic per year, according to Plastic Oceans International. Half of that plastic waste comes from single-use products, like empty vape pen cartridges or those nearly-impossible-to-open child-proof edibles boxes. And with America’s legal weed industry selling $9 billion worth of product in 2018 alone, those plastic waste numbers are only on the incline.
In fact, Washington State has built-up so much plastic waste from weed products that it started clogging the state’s waterways.
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