California’s cannabis waste recycling efforts are being hampered by fears of a black market

AAmerican cannabis has gone from a small-scale cottage industry to a $22.5 billion-a-year business that employs 428.059 people across the country. Today’s marijuana is very different from what was once sold raw. Once delivered in sandwich bags, flower now comes wrapped in plastic-lined, child-safety-locked mylar pouches. Every gram of cannabis must have its own glass container, lid and cardboard box. Half-gram vape pen must be weighed from three times their weight before being used. While most of the outer packaging can easily be recycled, vaporizer cartridges can be more difficult to dispose of.

Cannabis is The US is more popular than ever — 44 percent of adults have access to it, either MedicallyOder RecreationallyMore than 90% of adults support full legalization. A 2021 Weedmaps survey indicates that. Use has risen by 50%Since the outbreak of the pandemic. What’s more, edibles and concentrates continue to rise in popularity among all age groups, from boomers to doomers. This increased demand for vape cartridges — both near-ubiquitous 510-threads like those from Rove or more specialized carts like the Pax Era Pods — has led to their increased production and, in turn, their inevitable arrival in American landfills. In California, the nation’s largest legal cannabis market, 510 cartridges are quite popular but, due to the state’s strict hazardous waste disposal regulations, difficult to dispose of in a responsible manner.

The production side involves the destruction of virtually every component, component, growth medium and nutrient. Taylor Vozniak is the Sales and Marketing Manager at California cannabis waste management company. Gaiaca, told Engadget, “it would be plants after they’ve been trimmed, grow medium — that’s either going to be soil or rock wool or cocoa husk — any sort of water nutrients or pesticides.”

At the manufacturing stage, the company handles post-production green waste (think, mashed up stems and leaves) as well as hazardous waste like concentrate solvents and failed edible product batches like misshapen canna-gummies or burned weed brownies — the latter must be destroyed on-site to stay within bounds of the California Cannabis Track and Trace System (CCTT) operated by the state’s Department of Cannabis Control. The CCTT applies to the point at which merchandise is sold. This means that local dispensaries are responsible in disposing of any returned or damaged product.

“Single-use batteries have been a big sticking point for a while now,” Vozniak said. “We’re proud that we can recycle those vape batteries either with or without cannabis.” As it turns out, much of the underlying impetus for the creation of the CCTT system, Vozniak notes, is to prevent this waste from being illicitly harvested and resold. “The overarching way these regulations were written the way they were is to prevent any sort of product going into the black market,” he noted, which is why cannabis by-products, which is what all the stuff above is considered, has to be rendered into inert “waste” before it gets put in the ground. It’s also why your local dispensary doesn’t have a drop-off bin for used cartridges.

Products are handled slightly differently depending on whether they’re THC or CBD-based. “CBD is federally legal,” Vozniak said — so that it can be transported across state lines for disposal, “while THC is state-by-state regulated. A lot of the time you’ll see, especially in California, CBD destroyed on site, but I have a client in Dallas who I’ve been able to just take their product as-is off site to a disposal facility.”

You can recycle or compost materials. After six months, any remaining THC can be leached out and fully decomposed before it is repackaged and used as a gardening supplement. Instead, less sustainable materials such as used nitrile gloves and non-recyclable/food-contaminated packaging will be routed to local landfills or incinerators. Vape cartridges are not allowed. Those, along with the Li-ion batteries that power them, are considered e-waste in California so there’s a litany of additional regulatory hurdles to jump through before throwing one away.

“What ends up happening is you’ll be able to take [used carts and batteries] to a recycling vendor for a while,” Vozniak said, until “they realize it’s a difficult product to deal with, so we’ll have to find new vendors.”

The difficulty with recycling cartridges lies in their complex construction and mix of materials — woven cloth wicks and aluminum atomizers sealed by plastic walls with rubber o-rings keeping the viscous liquid in place. You can’t very well clean, sort, and disassemble these items by hand; as e-waste, they’re sorted, cleaned and then repeatedly mechanically shredded and resorted into progressively smaller chunks until they’re reduced and separated into their constituent materials. Vizniak explains how vape pen batteries go through the same process. They’re first statically separated by density, then dipped into liquid nitrogen to instantly freeze and deactivate the lithium ion cells before they’re pulverized with mechanical hammers and further sorted for commodity sale.

If that seems like a whole lot of work for such tiny devices, you’re not wrong. Even though California’s legal marijuana industry has existed for less then a decade, many of Prop 54’s verbiage is losing its relevance. “When things were first written, there was a lack of understanding of how the cannabis industry would end up operating,” Vozniak said. He cites the all-in one (AIO), pen battery disposal, as an example.

“We still have to destroy these products on site — and I understand the concern there, they [state regulators] don’t want anything going to the black market — but for these all-in-one-pens, there really is no way to destroy them without putting the operators at risk,” he continued. “A lot of times, operators are going to try to destroy these products themselves because Gaica can be on the more expensive side just because of the nature of what we do. It’s very labor intensive.”

Vozniak has seen cannabis retailers encase old AIOs in blocks of resin to deactivate them — whole drums of resin-ensconced lithium batteries that no recycler would ever take — in order to comply with the state’s “destroy on-site” order. Vozniak argues that a basic exemption to that rule specifically for cannabis e-waste could, “really help the industry out because that’s really what I’m seeing most — out of state as well.”

Vape pen users who want to reduce their carbon footprint can contact their state and district representatives. Refillable cartridges 510 are available — they operate just as the single-use canisters from the dispensary do but have a screw-on lid for injecting fresh oil — such as the Flacko JodyeKandyPens provides the following: SPRK ceramicPCKT is an all-in one kit Kiara NaturalsOr the Puffco Plus. It is easy to maintain and clean refillable tanks. They can also be easily topped up using a dab syringeIf you are looking for a home-made product, you can purchase it from your local dispensary.