Cannabis sustainability: packaging waste vs production waste
By Alex Rumi
Cannabis sustainability is usually discussed in terms of packaging, but the larger environmental footprint comes from how the cannabis is produced. Packaging is the visible waste: the plastic tube, the mylar bag, the humidity pack. Production waste is larger and mostly invisible to the consumer: the growing medium, the energy used to run an indoor facility, the inputs fed to the plant, and the runoff generated by those inputs. This article lays out both halves of the question so the trade-offs are clear.
packaging vs production
What counts as cannabis packaging waste?
Packaging waste is the material used to ship a product. In Canada, cannabis is significant because regulations require child-resistant, opaque, single-use packaging, which tends to be plastic. The common components are the container (plastic tube, mylar bag, or jar), a humidity control pack, and the outer label or carton.
Packaging waste is real, and it's worth reducing. It is also the smaller share of a cannabis product's total environmental footprint. It's discussed most because it's the part the consumer physically handles, which makes it visible — but that doesn’t mean it’s the biggest problem.
Reductions are straightforward when producers choose to make them: Smaller plastic containers, packaging that retains humidity without a separate pack, recyclable materials, and reusable or resealable formats that don't have to be destroyed upon opening.
What counts as cannabis production waste?
Production waste is everything consumed or discarded during plant growth and processing, before packaging enters the picture. It has four main categories:
Growing medium. Most cannabis is grown in single-use material — plastic pots, coco coir, or rockwool — much of which is discarded after one crop cycle. Rockwool, a spun mineral-fibre product widely used in indoor and greenhouse cultivation, does not readily break down or be recycled and largely ends up in landfill after a single use.
Energy. Indoor cannabis cultivation requires continuous artificial lighting, heating, cooling, and dehumidification. It is one of the more energy-intensive ways to grow a plant. Outdoor cultivation uses sunlight and ambient climate, removing most of this load.
Inputs. Conventional cultivation feeds plants synthetic mineral salts, principally nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. These carry an environmental cost at the point of manufacture (see below). Synthetic pesticides used in some operations add a further input footprint.
Runoff. Synthetic nitrogen and phosphorus not absorbed by the plant leach into the watershed, where they drive nutrient over-enrichment that feeds algal blooms. These algal blooms then decay, depleting oxygen in lakes and rivers. Nutrient runoff from agriculture is one of the leading causes of water-quality damage worldwide.
What is the environmental cost of synthetic cannabis nutrients?
A bottle of synthetic nutrients carries a footprint twice: Once at manufacture (fossil fuels and mining) and again at the back end (runoff into waterways).
The cost differs by nutrient. Some of the key nutrients in synthetic fertilisers are nitrogen and potassium.
Synthetic nitrogen is produced through the Haber-Bosch process, which relies almost entirely on natural gas as both an energy source and a feedstock. It is among the most carbon-intensive industrial chemical reactions; the synthetic nitrogen supply chain accounts for roughly 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions — more than the entire aviation industry — and producing a tonne of ammonia generates over two tonnes of CO₂.
Synthetic potassium comes mainly from potash, which is mined. Potash mining is associated with soil and freshwater salinisation, ground sinking, and brine discharge that has degraded rivers downstream of major operations.
Is outdoor cannabis better for the environment than indoor?
For the most part, outdoor cultivation has a smaller footprint than indoor cultivation. It uses sunlight instead of artificial lighting and climate control, which removes the largest energy cost. The advantage of indoor cultivation is control — consistent year-round output independent of weather and season.
The honest trade-offs of outdoor growing are a fixed once-a-year harvest, exposure to weather, and lower yield per square foot. These are real constraints. The environmental benefit is a direct consequence of using natural light and climate rather than machinery to replicate them.
Greenhouse cultivation sits between the two: More natural light than indoor, but typically still supplemented with lighting, heating, and climate control.
What does living soil change?
Living soil is a biologically active soil system that is reused across multiple crop cycles rather than being replaced each time. Because the soil is amended and reused rather than discarded, it eliminates the single-use medium — pots and rockwool — that conventional cultivation sends to landfill each cycle. It also reduces or eliminates the need for synthetic inputs in bottles, because soil biology converts organic amendments into plant-available nutrients.
How GOOD BUDS sits on these measures
We built GOOD BUDS to sit at the low-waste end of every one of the above categories, so I'll use our own farm to show what that looks like in practice:
We’re an FVOPA-certified organic farm on Salt Spring Island, BC. We were Canada's first licensed outdoor cannabis producer. Most of our cannabis, including our flagship Gluerangutan and Timewarp strains, is grown outdoors in sunlight rather than under lights. Our living soil beds — indoor and outdoor — have been in continuous reuse since 2019. They’ve never been replaced, which removes single-use media from the waste stream. We never use rockwool. Irrigation is 100% rainwater captured from on-farm retention ponds, and we feed our plants this pond water without filtering it to retain its microbial life for our plants to absorb. Our outdoor crop is fed a single organic amendment, alfalfa meal. So no synthetic mineral salts are ever used. This means no harmful nutrient runoff from the property. On the packaging side, our flower ships in low-plastic Ecolite resealable tubes that maintain humidity without requiring a separate Boveda pack.
None of this eliminates the trade-offs — outdoor growing means one harvest a year and dependence on the season. Still, it removes the bulk of the environmental cost from the production process rather than addressing only the packaging at the end.
The short version:
Packaging is the visible part of cannabis waste and the easiest to ask about. Production — medium, energy, inputs, and runoff — is the larger part and the harder one to see from the shelf. The most useful questions a buyer can ask are: How was it grown? What was it fed? Where did the water come from? Those three answers separate genuinely low-impact cannabis from cannabis that is simply packaged to look that way.
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.
