Single use plastic & Childproof Requirements
A glimpse of the cannabis industry’s waste.
In a day and age when every country in the world, including China, has realized that plastics are not a sustainable packaging source, and even modern recycling technology is not helping address the problem as China is now refusing to take plastic for recycling from other countries, how is the number of emerging industries on planet earth still stuck on plastic? The fact is paper, glass, wood, ceramics, and even some metals have always been and will forever be a better packaging material than plastic. For cannabis this especially holds true.
One of the hardest things for me to come to terms with during this transition to the over regulated 2018 California “legal” cannabis market has been the absurd amount of waste produced due mainly to the onerous regulations around child proof packaging. I have been working with cannabis since I was a kid, and there has never been this kind of waste generated in the cannabis trade. It’s a shame when its not doing anyone any good, and the children are not any more protected. If anything, it is harming these children more by contributing to polluting the planet they look to inherit.
We are child proofing vape cartridges that a child could never thread onto a battery and definitely couldn’t know that the battery button must be clicked five times to turn on! We are child proofing flowers that would take a pipe or a rolled joint to smoke! We are limiting the dosage in edibles because we can’t trust adults to medicate responsibly, yet we child proof it for the kids! All this while you can walk into a Safeway, buy a bottle of Bacardi 151, and with a simple screw of the cap, and if you chose to, you could hurl flames from your mouth in the grocery store! Who decided this over packaging was a good idea and why? Well, what is the root of all evil? Money!
We must make a stand to change this ridiculously over regulated part of the law. It’s destroying the environment and goes against a global effort to ban single use plastics. Our industry has a chance to right a wrong and show that we care about the earth first. When we haven’t ever made an effort on this level to protect children from things like alcohol or even household cleaners that can kill them, how can we stand around and allow bureaucrats to create ancillary companies that are only doing business because of laws they pushed through – laws which are destroying the planet and causing cannabis to have an environmental impact it has never brought to our planet before? We can’t!
We have started a petition that will be presented to legislators as well as the California Bureau of Cannabis Control addressing the issue of unnecessary packaging that is overwhelming our industry.
We are asking that the law be changed to not require individual products to be child proofed. We would request that exit bags always be offered at the time of sale, and require retailers to always have exit bags for all products upon request, which the retailer must offer at every transaction. We are asking for this because our industry stands to be stewards of the earth, and single use plastics are one of the most serious environmental concerns on planet earth today. Please sign and support!
Sign Here:http://chng.it/7jXJP2dvH7