ST. LOUIS — There’s a problem in the cannabis industry.
After the flowers are harvested, the stems are left. After the vapes are smoked, the cartridges are empty.
As the marijuana business grows, so does the amount of waste it produces. But cultivators and retailers can’t just throw away bad materials. To meet Missouri disposal requirements, the product must be mixed up with another material — made useless — before being taken to a state-approved disposal site.
Enter Monarch Waste Co., a St. Louis-based mobile cannabis waste management service. Co-founded and operated by husband-wife duo Zach McCullough and Annie Macheca, Monarch grinds and mixes cannabis products and plants for disposal across Missouri.
Since Missouri voters legalized adult-use marijuana in 2022, the industry has boomed, bringing in over $3 billion in sales in less than two years. And with that growth has come waste: In 2023, the state saw 276 tons of harvest and package waste and, so far this year, 436 tons more, according to data from the state health department. In 2022, prior to the start of recreational sales, 195 tons of waste were produced.
“We’re realizing, now with three years of industry experience, just how much waste gets produced in any industry. It’s kind of unfathomable. The cannabis industry is no different,” McCullough said.
The state requires disposal of plant waste such as marijuana flowers, root balls, stems, laboratory wastes and growing material, plus manufacturing waste like beverages, edibles, pre-rolled joints, lotions and more.
But that’s not all. This year alone, the state has recalled 198,000 cannabis products. Retailers can dispose of some themselves. But many of the items were extract-based like cartridges and vape pens, which typically include glass, plastic or batteries.
McCullough and Macheca say getting rid of all of that is confusing for retailers.
“Most of the cannabis businesses have a hundred or more regulations they have to follow and waste is just a tiny, little regulation that they don’t fully understand because those regulations are confusing or they don’t fully understand the environmental impact of improper handling,” Macheca said.
Cloud Ten, a cannabis testing lab in Missouri, has been using Monarch’s services for years now. Lab manager Ross Bearman said the service helps the lab free up labor and storage space. He said that Monarch comes to the site once a month and at their last visit, they ground up about 75 pounds of waste.
“Disposal is time-consuming. Dedicating labor to that task was an all-day thing,” Bearman said. “Labs are wasteful, that’s just the nature of it… I couldn’t be happier with them.”
‘Eat up and spit out anything’
When the legalization of medical cannabis was set to appear on the ballot in November 2018, McCullough and Macheca were eager to join the industry, but they were denied medical cannabis cultivation and dispensary licenses. They had already acquired disposal equipment (they had planned to process waste in-house, if approved), so the team pivoted. And in 2021, Monarch Waste was born.
“Once we kind of got over the heartbreak of it all and licked our wounds a little bit, we still had a great timeline ahead of us,” McCullough said. “We already had the understanding of the rules, even beyond the waste rules.”
Today, Monarch Waste travels to testing, dispensary, cultivation and manufacturing facilities throughout the state.
The state requires nonhazardous marijuana products to be shredded and mixed with a non-marijuana material (for Monarch Waste, this is straw and animal beddings like pine chips), so the cannabis is unusable before leaving the site. Then the waste must be taken to a licensed disposal site.
McCullough said this task is more of a hassle than production companies and dispensaries are willing to take on, so they are happy to employ Monarch Waste to do the work. (Think of it like a laundry service that picks up a a restaurant’s dirty rags to clean). He said they currently serve about 10% of the cannabis industry in Missouri.
McCullough and Macheca have backgrounds in environmental science and agroecology, respectively, and created Monarch Waste with the mission of helping divert green waste away from landfills. So far, the company has diverted close to 300,000 pounds of nonhazardous waste and has recycled over 17,870 Lithium-ion batteries, they said, found in products like vape pens.
Monarch has two grinding machines, one truck and six employees. One of the grinding machines can go through 10,000 pounds of cannabis waste a day, according to McCullough.
“They can basically eat up and spit out anything,” he said.
In the new year, Monarch Waste is launching a vape pen battery take-back program in which consumers are encouraged to drop off their used vape batteries for recycling at five 3Fifteen Primo dispensaries.
Macheca said such batteries cause fires in landfills everyday and, often, single-use vape pens get thrown away without a second thought, so the upcoming program is “a simple way to solve a big problem.”
Also next year, Monarch Waste has plans to bring on more machines and vehicles.
“We just keep getting calls about products that need to be destroyed,” Macheca said. “More businesses are starting to recognize that sustainability isn’t just good for the environment, it’s good for their businesses, especially because cannabis consumers care about how companies operate and sustainable practices can really set a brand apart.”
H/T: news.google.com
