Editor’s note: This is the fourth and final article in a series about private and public-sector efforts to scale reusable packaging systems in the Portland, Oregon, area.
MILWAUKIE, Ore. — The next garden plant you buy might be in a plastic pot with a connection to a different kind of pot: recycled cannabis packaging. P3 Distributing is an example of a company that is diversifying its service offerings, including by adopting a reuse system. Now, it aims to achieve scale.
Owner Patrick Caldwell founded the cannabis packaging supply company with his father in the Portland suburb of Milwaukie in 2016, and he soon wanted to find a more sustainable end-of-life solution for the packaging items he sold. The issue really hit home for him a year later when China announced its National Sword policy to clamp down on plastic scrap imports, and Caldwell’s local plastic processor no longer would accept those materials. That led him to explore adding recycling operations at P3, which happened in 2017.
Conventional recyclers typically find cannabis packaging too small or too contaminated with cannabis oils to deal with, Caldwell said. But P3 specifically targets polypropylene packaging, which he said is “highly recyclable and highly valuable.” It accepts other substrates as well, including metal and fiber, but it takes those to a local processor…