Solving for X,Y,Z, and MMJ
Tags: Plastic, Medical Marijuana, Waste, Marijuana, Cannabis

We were just a couple of amped-up college kids — a history major and a technology major — who liked to learn and talk about complicated problems. We didn’t know much about medical marijuana (MMJ) dispensary packaging, plastics, manufacturing or even business, for that matter. But we had diverse backgrounds, skills, and an understanding that plastic waste was a trending topic in 2018 for good reason — it’s ubiquitous, and its omnipresence and the damage it can cause was becoming obvious. Like most people who have hearts and minds, we wanted to do something about it, and also like most, we had no idea where to start. But for some reason, we were crazy enough to try.

Over time, research, conversations, and more time, we started to understand the big problems — the physical properties of plastics that make them useful but also make them problematic, the geopolitical issues with some nations not recycling with others anymore, and a lack of infrastructure for businesses in the US to react. We learned a lot, but not about issues with a scope and scale that we could consider impacting. We had to look at subsets of the problem to understand what an organization — like a business (ie Resinate) could possibly do to help. That’s when we started looking at the problems specific to Arizona.

Colorful cannabis packaging, fresh from patients who are happy to recycle it.

Actually, that’s also when I looked down at a dresser drawer in my bedroom — a drawar that I had been slowly filling with plastic MMJ packaging… and I then I asked myself “why am I doing this? Why do I put my food packaging in the blue recycling bin, but I put these little things in here, and are these stupid little things recyclable?”

So I found out. I talked to Lucas Mariacher who directs Zero Waste for the City of Phoenix and I toured the North Gateway Transfer Station in Phoenix, Arizona. I learned that even though this cannabis packaging (and pharmaceutical packaging) could be recycled (unlike those mylar bags that some dispensaries use), these plastic poptops…. can’t be recycled by the city in the blue bin or elsewhere.

The issue comes from a machine called a glass-crusher/conveyer, which has the job of crushing large pieces of glass, letting small pieces fall downward, and pushing all the lighter, stronger items (like water bottles and yogurt containers) across the top toward the next machine. Smaller plastics like bottle caps and MMJ pop-top containers fall down with the glass and get discarded.

To put it simply, any plastics under about 2" in diameter fall through the cracks of recycling systems and go into landfills. This was a big discovery because it means every year, literally thousands of tons of recyclable materials are going into landfills or ecosystems instead of getting recycled into something with real, lasting value.

Brandon begins the “really icky part” of assembling electronics. He has connected many, many new wires since this photo. Still smiling for most of them!

While we were out in the mess of dysfunctional systems looking for problems, we were also in the background trying to develop solutions. An open-source project allowed us to build machines on a small scale and get started with the actual physical process of turning plastic waste into viable products. We knew these home-built systems were slow and wouldn’t scale, and that we’d have to come up with both a better system and a more focused end-product, compared to what most people were making at a hobby scale.

Luke begins some of the loud cutting parts of building an injection molding machine. Nice cuts, Luke!

So we spent some grueling hours building machines, testing them, destroying trash, making wholesale improvements to machinery and processes, and we began making small, generally useless little things out of whatever plastics we could get our hands on. Mostly milk jugs and bags (#2 plastic) and all types of bottles (#1, #2 and #5) from friends. We learned how strange and finicky these materials were just to process into flakes and into a hot goo, much less to make an excellent product.

Garret finishes injection for a little planter. We switched the lights off the electronics for this photo because there are some parts of our process we like to keep to ourselves.

That stage completed the first few factors of the formula we have been trying to build — a formula that starts with problematic plastic and ends with a long-lasting product made from that material (much like the companies Trex or Preserve). The problematic plastic has been identified, and we’ve connected with Mission Dispensary as the first medical marijuana dispensary to pilot our advanced receptacle — which is installed there now. This HIPAA-compliant device is now installed and actively helping us collect from patients. We now have one “test product” in several stores and that’s going well as we develop our “real” product line for specific people — cannabis users who smoke flower and love dopely engineered products, like trays.

Brandon trims up a rock-climbing hold — one of our early promising concepts before we realized climbing holds was not the right market for Resinate. Still, Phoenix Rock Gym — the biggest and best rock climbing gym in AZ — has about 5 of these installed and they’re going strong. It was a good experiment.

But before we started talking to dispensaries and patients, we found a problem worth solving, both environmentally and economically. Before we ever had the idea of making cannabis products like rolling trays from this material, we developed processes to get started and a small crew of people who possess the skills and passion to kill it (in a good way). We’re now focused on the precision design of beautiful cannabis products that we will make from this otherwise wasted material, and we believe this will make a difference in people’s lives. In a later article, I want to talk about some of the other factors that we encountered along the way, and the ideas and solutions that are making this project come together.