“Hemp Plastics”

A Solution to Cannabis Waste Too Good to Be True — For Now

By Jeffrey Rindskopf, Dope Magazine.

Jade Stefano has been trying to eliminate plastic use in her personal life, but the task of merely not adding to humanity’s number one source of pollution gets much harder once cannabis is involved.

“Cannabis packaging does have a huge plastic problem,” writes Stefano, co-founder and CEO of Puffin Farm, a Clean Green Certified cannabis producer near the Yakima River in Washington state.

It’s a problem that cannabis consumers experience firsthand, as well. Some higher-end brands can afford to adopt biodegradable alternatives like Puffin’s glass doob tubes, but regulatory demands and simple economics dictate that the vast majority of products one can legally purchase to get high come packaged in synthetic, single-use plastics.

While plastic’s hardiness may be handy for child-proofing our edibles and keeping sandwiches fresh, it becomes a problem once it’s disposed of in the natural environment — as 91 percent of plastics are — where it can take 500 years or more to degrade. Before then, it enters landfills, suffocates ocean ecosystems and breaks down into carcinogenic microplastics, which have already been found in creatures from the bottom of the ocean to an estimated 93 percent of American humans at the top of the food chain.

“This type of packaging always involves plastic, and there are no good solutions,” Stefano explains, “save extremely expensive [bioplastics], which most operators simply can’t afford.”

Read the full article: Hemp Plastics.