People often summarize our state’s experiment with legal weed by citing the amount of money spent by consumers ($2 billion) or the amount of cannabis tax collected ($400 million). But there’s a third number that is equally impressive: 1.7 million pounds.
That’s the amount of plant waste created by Washington State’s legal marijuana industry since pot farms were first licensed in 2014, and that waste has a dirty secret. While the tax man and the pot dealer are getting their cash, most of the compostable waste created by the industry is being dumped in landfills.
