California Cannabis and Voter Mandated Pollution

Last week I wrote a short piece about California’s massive cannabis packaging problem, where I touched on some of the confusion caused by ambiguous language, flexible interpretation, and the burdens of compliance faced by small producers. As the founder and CEO of a craft-scale topicals company, I was speaking from a personal place largely about struggles I am facing myself.

In the last week there have been both positive and negative developments. For the positive, I was able to communicate with someone at the Manufactured Cannabis branch of the Department of Health & Safety and was given the go-ahead to use a secondary package that is child resistant, so that our two-time Emerald Cup winning roll-on, Deep Skin, could stay in it’s friendly and easy-to-use form. On Tuesday morning, when I received this good news, I was ecstatic. By Tuesday night, I was once again decrying the absurdity of a poorly written, ignorantly passed voter initiative called Prop 64.

Let me explain.

With gleeful abandon I had immediately got online and ordered a substantial number of child-resistant multi-use bags; nice ones, sized just perfect, with an appearance that matched the quality of the product it would contain. That evening I went to a local startup event where my two worlds collided - cannabis industry and startup community - and had the opportunity to capture the attention of a significant number of cannabis retail professionals and chat them up about products, regulations, consumer trends, and the like. I shared with them my good news, talked a little bit about the product, and was both enlightened and horrified to hear from one of them about an issue I hadn’t given the appropriate amount of thought.

Those exit bags aren’t recyclable

But surely, I thought, the lovely expensive ones I purchased must be?!

No. No they’re not. Not mine, not anyone’s. Unbeknownst to me Mylar isn’t a very recyclable type of plastic, largely because of the metal impregnation but also because they’re designed to be multiple-use with a long life-span, with the exception of Mylar party balloons which should just be f*ing banned.

On the plus side, the only three Mylar recycling centers in the entire United States are in the Bay Area: San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose. On the downside, it would take a pretty substantial haul of Mylar to request the pick-up.

My new dispensary contact further informed me that, as a counter sales-person, she would discourage customers from purchasing products that required extra packaging, citing a specific example of a roll-on like mine that was being sold in an oversized exit bag. As someone whos livelihood depends on the good graces of dispensary salespeople, this worries me. I thought I was ready for go-to-market, but now I’m developing a whole Mylar recycling incentives program.

It isn’t all about me, though, because this problem is state/industry-wide. A preponderance of dispensaries are still sending customers out the door with all of their purchases further packed inside one of these non-recyclable Mylar exit bags, and inside the bags are individual products that themselves are packaged in Mylar. Consumers are certainly tossing them in the trash or recycling, where they’ll invariably end up in a landfill. Worse yet, I’ve been seeing these bags on city streets and in parks, where they serve as a permanent and indelible detraction on an industry and a medicine that so many fought for so long to get to this point.

It’s awful and ironic that this is a situation belleugering a state that recently banned disposable bags at all other retailers because of the insane amount of litter and pollution they cause. That it would be banned for everyone else and mandated for us is a contradiction on sense and policy that boggles the mind. But of course, this is the kind of thing that happens when people, be they individual voters or elected representatives, vote in favor of something that they never bothered to read or understand.