Canna Collect Recycling Program Update: Day 75 – Holy Crap!
“La Surprise” by Violaine & Jeremy
The headline pretty much sums up how we feel about our Canna Collect recycling program today, which was covered by King5 News on August 29. Here’s the King5 report, in case you missed it. That was a happy day! We were so hopeful back then, but we were also so ignorant of the waste industry’s warts, which range from a serious lack of investment in innovation (hello 1990? Your mainframe is on fire.) to a litany of state regulatory issues recycling companies are forced to adhere to, and then there is the actual stank of the product the industry’s employees deal with on a daily basis.
As for the lack of innovation or capital investment in the waste industry? Consider that there are oil-field engineers fixing busted oil rigs through the use of Microsoft’s Hololens. Entire factories are now filled with millions of sensors that provide millions of data points back to the cloud, where engineers can fix most issues from a laptop, or a smartphone.
Yet the recycling industry/system can’t physically recycle any plastic food-related container in a tube shape (this is an issue not limited to cannabis packaging) with a lid smaller than three inches across?
Drowning in doob tubes…
Our lives at Canna are now literally filled with plastic waste, but at least we are not alone. Thanks to a great story published the other day by Leafly.com, we know there are others out there fighting the good fight with us, and running into the same head-scratching roadblocks. The public, however, is largely unaware of the realities we now know. They continue to recycle their plastic containers at the curb each week assuming they are being recycled. It is a fool’s errand.
To be quite honest, we don’t yet know what to do with the stuff that can’t be recycled, mostly the litany of doob-tubes, smaller plastic flower containers and mylar bags, which make up 50% of the stuff. We will continue to collect though, while also trying to build meaningful partnerships and relationships that will allow us to repurpose this plastic in a sustainable manner that is also beneficial to the environment.
Until then, our collection of stuff will continue to grow like a weed, or Leon…
