All industries are striving to incorporate sustainable processes to reduce, reuse, and recycle and the cannabis packaging industry is no different. In a recent NBC Boston article, Massachusetts-based recreational marijuana company, Tree House Craft Cannabis (Tree House Craft) has implemented a program to incentivize recycling of its packaging.
According to the article, stores find themselves inundated by the volume of plastic packaging coming through their doors. Child safety standards for cannabis packaging are such that extra layers of plastic are required to make the products more difficult to access and to open. This extra plastic exacerbates sustainability concerns and would likely go straight into the waste stream.
Tree House Craft designed a strategy to increase the circularity of cannabis packaging at large through redeeming, recycling, and even reusing the plastic packaging in certain cases. The program has been put into place at both of its dispensaries in Dracut and Pepperell.
The program includes “a financial incentive to customers if they return the plastic packaging, no matter where it was purchased,” says the article. This incentive can reach up to $4.
Tree House Craft has had 7,000 redemptions since first introducing this offer in May 2023. Though the article notes that not everyone who returns a package goes on to use the incentive offer. The company considers the success of the program substantial enough to attempt a collaboration with the Cannabis Control Commission to roll the program out across the state of Massachusetts.
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