When Cheap Packaging Gets Expensive

Over the past few years, I’ve watched more and more cannabis companies replace rigid polypropylene containers with flexible mylar pouches.

I understand why.

Margins are tighter than they’ve ever been, and every processor is looking for ways to reduce costs. Mylar uses less material, ships more efficiently, takes up less warehouse space, and costs less to manufacture. If you’re comparing invoices, the decision makes perfect sense.

But I’ve come to believe that the purchase price only tells part of the story.

One thing that makes my perspective different is that I don’t just sell packaging. I also spend every day collecting it after consumers are finished with it.

Over the years, I’ve watched thousands of pounds of cannabis packaging come back through our recycling program. Seeing what happens after a package leaves the dispensary changes the way you think about packaging decisions.

One thing that makes Oregon unique is our deli-style flower market.

Unlike many other states, Oregon dispensaries still serve flower directly from larger containers. That retail model has helped preserve the use of rigid polypropylene packaging throughout the supply chain. Consumers recognize it. Retailers work with it every day. More importantly, it fits into a recycling economy that already exists.

I don’t think we should take that for granted.

Polypropylene isn’t perfect, but it has something incredibly valuable: an established recovery system.

Across North America there are collection programs, processors, manufacturers, and end markets already built around recovering polypropylene and turning it into new products. That infrastructure wasn’t created overnight. It took decades to develop.

The difference isn’t just in how these materials are recycled. It’s in the economics behind that recovery.

Recovered polypropylene has value because there are established markets that purchase it and turn it into new products. Once it’s collected and processed, it becomes a feedstock that manufacturers actively buy.

Flexible packaging follows a different path. Recovering it often requires transporting the material to specialized facilities that have the equipment to process multilayer plastics. Those transportation and processing costs become part of the recovery equation before the material can ever become a new product.

That’s one of the reasons recovery rates between these two materials look so different.

Research published by MIT, Harvard, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell found that the majority of post-consumer flexible plastic packaging in the United States ultimately ends up in landfills or incinerators.

The Pew Charitable Trusts reached a similar conclusion from a different perspective. Despite the rapid growth of flexible packaging, 96% of the plastic packaging that reaches formal recycling systems is rigid plastic. Flexible and multilayer packaging remain a challenge because they’re more difficult to collect, sort, and recycle at scale.

The cannabis industry has become very good at measuring what packaging costs to buy. I think it’s time we become just as good at measuring what it costs after it’s used.

Today, polypropylene has an established recovery economy. Flexible packaging largely does not. That isn’t an opinion. It’s reflected in the recovery infrastructure that exists today and in the research showing how these materials are actually managed at the end of their life.

As our industry continues to evolve, I believe packaging decisions should be based on the entire lifecycle of the product, not just the purchase price. When we do that, the conversation changes. We stop asking which package is cheapest to buy and start asking which package creates the most long-term value.

In my next article, I want to shift the conversation beyond recycling.

Oregon’s unique deli-style cannabis market has created something that very few legal markets have: a retail system that still depends on durable, reusable containers. That creates an opportunity that simply doesn’t exist in most of the country.

At P3, we’ve spent years building the collection network that makes recovering those containers possible. The next challenge is even more exciting. Instead of asking how we recycle them after one use, what if we designed a system that allowed them to be cleaned, reused, and put back into circulation?

I think that’s where the future of sustainable cannabis packaging begins.