The cannabis sustainability conversation is stuck on packaging. The bigger problem is how the flower is grown.
By Alex Rumi
Every time we talk to customers about sustainability, the conversation ends up in the same place: packaging. The plastic tube. The mylar bag you rip open and throw out. The little humidity pack inside.
People are right to be annoyed about it — cannabis generates a silly amount of single-use plastic for a product that's mostly a dried flower. Most of this is unavoidable. Health Canada requires that the products be placed in child-resistant packaging by the producer, and competing needs for freshness and sustainability make this challenging.
We did our best with the packaging options we had access to. Our flower ships in EcoLite doob tubes, which use half as much plastic as a standard tube. They seal well enough that you don't need a Boveda pack tossed in to hold humidity — the tube does it on its own, so that's one more little single-use thing that doesn't get made and thrown away. And the tube is reusable. Buy a seven-gram, smoke a gram, close it back up, and the rest stays fresh in there for a month or two while you work through it. It's not a mylar bag you've already destroyed by the time you get home.
That's the packaging part. We're glad to talk about it, since it’s an important piece in the sustainability puzzle. But here's the thing almost nobody in this industry wants to bring up: packaging is the small problem.
The big one is production.
Where the waste actually is
If you want to know whether a cannabis producer is actually low-impact or just says nice things on the label, don't look at the tube. Look at how the plant was grown. That's where the real footprint lives, and it's the part the "green" marketing tends to skip.
Most cannabis in this country is grown a specific way, and that way is wasteful by design. A few of the biggest culprits:
Single-use pots. Plants are grown in plastic pots or bags, then many operations toss the growing medium — and sometimes the pots — at the end of a cycle — every harvest, more plastic and more spent medium out the door.
Rockwool. A huge amount of indoor and greenhouse cannabis is grown in rockwool — spun mineral fibre cubes and slabs. It's effective. It's also a single-use mineral-wool product that mostly ends up in landfill after one crop, because it doesn't break down and isn't easily recycled.
Synthetic mineral salts. It is the one that gets ignored most, and it's the one with the longest tail. Conventional cannabis is usually fed with bottled synthetic nutrients — nitrogen, potassium, and the rest — and those salts come at a real environmental cost long before they ever reach the plant.
The energy load. Indoor and most greenhouse-grown cannabis runs on grow lights and HVAC, around the clock. Light, heat, cooling, dehumidification. It's an extremely energy-hungry way to grow a plant that, given the option, is perfectly happy growing in the sun.
None of that shows up on the package. But it makes up the majority of the actual footprint.
The nutrient problem nobody talks about
The synthetic salts deserve a closer look because this is where the gap between "looks green" and "is green" widens.
Synthetic nitrogen is made by pulling nitrogen out of the air and combining it with hydrogen from natural gas — a process called Haber-Bosch that's one of the most energy-intensive industrial reactions humans do at scale. The synthetic nitrogen supply chain accounts for roughly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions, more than all of aviation.
Synthetic potassium is the mining story. The "K" in those nutrient bottles mostly comes from potash, which is extracted from the ground at high environmental cost — soil and freshwater salinisation, ground subsidence above old workings, and brine discharge that has degraded rivers downstream of major operations.
And the cost doesn't end at the bottle. Synthetic nitrogen and phosphorus that the plant doesn't absorb leach into lakes and rivers, feeding algae blooms that decay and strip oxygen from the water. That process — eutrophication — is one of the leading causes of water-quality damage worldwide, and conventional agriculture is a primary driver.
So when a producer feeds plants on bottled synthetic salts, the footprint isn't just the bag in the cupboard. It's the natural gas burned to produce nitrogen, the land disturbed to mine potassium, and the waterway damage when the leftovers wash away. The longer version of this — including why ammonia is the building block of every nitrogen fertiliser, and how the math works on a per-tonne basis — is in our article on synthetic cannabis nutrients.
What we do instead
We're a family farm on Salt Spring Island, and we grow most of our cannabis outdoors in the actual sun. That single fact removes most of the list above — no grow lights, no round-the-clock HVAC, no climate built and powered by machinery. The sun is free, and it doesn't add to our carbon footprint.
But the part we're proudest of is the soil, because it's the part that's genuinely hard to copy.
We grow in living soil, and we've never replaced it. The same beds have been running since 2019 — indoors in raised soil beds, outdoors in mounded rows — and every cycle we amend them and grow again. We don't dump the grow medium between harvests. We don't grow in single-use pots indoors; we grow in permanent beds, which eliminates most of the plastic-pot waste that a standard indoor room generates. No rockwool. The soil is alive; it stays and gets better with age rather than being thrown away.
For our outdoor crop, the only thing we feed the plants is alfalfa meal. That's it—one organic amendment, and the rest the soil and the season handle. Everything we use is FVOPA-certified — the organic standard our whole farm is certified to — which means no synthetic mineral salts in the ground. Nothing mined, nothing made in a gas-fired plant, nothing to run off and feed an algae bloom downstream.
We don't irrigate with tap water. We catch rainwater in retention ponds on the property and water the plants with that — all of it, the whole season. We don't even filter it. The pond water carries its own living community of microbes and mycorrhizae, which go straight to the roots. The plants feed on it. My brother Tyler, who runs cultivation, likes to quote the fictional scientist behind Jurassic Park about this: “Nature finds a way”. Give the plant living soil, living water, and the actual sun, and it mostly knows what to do.
The drawbacks in our approach
It isn't a free lunch, and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Growing outdoors in living soil means we get only one harvest a year and are at the mercy of the weather. We can't flip a room and pump out another crop in eight weeks. Our yields per square foot are lower than those of a controlled indoor room. Some years the season cooperates, and some years it doesn't. We've made that trade-off on purpose because we think it makes better cannabis and a smaller mess — but it is a trade-off.
What we'd point to is the result. Our flagship, Gluerangutan, is grown exclusively outdoors in that living soil, and it carries the highest terpene load in our portfolio at around 4.5% total terpenes on average, which is high for cannabis generally, not just for outdoor. That isn't despite the way we grow it. We think it's because of it.
What to actually ask
If you care about this stuff, the packaging question is fine. Keep asking it. But the better question, the one that actually separates the green producers from the green marketing, is the one almost nobody asks at the counter:
“How was it grown, what was it fed, and where did the water come from?”
We've got an answer for all three. Most of the industry would rather you kept looking at the tube.
Alex Rumi is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at GOOD BUDS, an FVOPA Certified Organic cannabis farm on Salt Spring Island, BC. He has worked in the licensed Canadian cannabis industry since 2017.
