Legal pot can do a lot of things — entertain, excite, destress — but it’s not often that you get to do some good for someone else, someone who really needs help, just by smoking up. Superette, the startup Westboro dispensary that has been raking in the praise (and awards) within the cannabis world, is setting out to change that by teaming up with the Ottawa Food Bank to turn recycled packaging into donated food. “Starting in December, and throughout 2020, we will be matching every unit of cannabis packaging that is recycled and brought back to the store with a unit of non-perishable food,” the store’s founder, Mimi Lam, announced to a group of supporters, neighbours and media on Friday morning. The store is initially committing to at least 5,000 items of food per month, and aiming for 60,000 by this time next year. That’s just a minimum, though — if more people recycle their pot packaging, more food gets donated. It will, admittedly, mean that the cannabis users of Ottawa — or at least Superette’s customers — need to up their game in the recycling department. Most people don’t know that cannabis packaging is, generally speaking, recyclable — the catch is that you can’t just throw it in with the cans and bottles and old newspapers, since the cannabis residue inside, however slight, renders it trash in the eyes of regulators. All recycling is done by TerraCycle, a private recycling company who teamed up with Tweed, in Smiths Falls, to develop a cannabis recycling program after a cacophony of complaints about excessive packaging at legalization’s outset. Right now, Superette gets “a couple hundred packages” returned every week. “We’re hoping that the people who aren’t currently recycling will jump on this initiative,” Cressida Firth, the store’s manager, told OttawaMatters. “We have everybody on the floor pushing it.” "It's like the feel-good version of bringing your empties back to the beer store," said one customer, Jane, in passing.