Photo by Jesse Milns
Remember the Reddit poster claiming to have received 16 separate shipping boxes from the Ontario Cannabis Store after he ordered 21 grams and a beaker bong? Stealth or environmentally-friendly packaging has certainly not been the friend of legalization in Canada.
Compared to the plastic baggies that black market consumers are accustomed to, the byproducts of legalization can be shocking—especially in cases where the container only contains 1 gram.
In true Canadian fashion, the industry has come together to make some improvements. Canopy Growth, the parent company of cannabis brand Tweed, partnered with TerraCycle to develop what they say is the first national recycling program for the Canadian cannabis industry. They place their boxes in cannabis retail stores across Canada, where consumers can toss in any empty cannabis packaging that they have.
If you’re in Ontario, the only place you can currently find a box is in Tweed’s visitor centre in Smith Falls, but we expect to see the recycling program proliferate as cannabis stores become more common.
Health Canada, for its part, is taking steps to tackle packaging sizes. Deep inside their plan to regulate edibles and extracts come Oct. 2019 is a proposal that would allow licensed producers to use expanded panels on labels, such as peel-back and accordion panels, to display certain mandatory information, and allow packages to shrink in size.
