An April 2022 study found that retailers and brands that promote their sustainability efforts are finding it not only good for the environment, but good for business. Conducted by Sensormatic Solutions, 81 percent of the respondents said they were concerned or very concerned about sustainability and the environment’s future.
Consumers continue to gravitate towards sustainable and eco-friendly businesses. Whether it be through packaging, how the materials are sourced, or any sort of recycling efforts, letting shoppers know just how you care for the environment is sure to boost sales. According to The Harvard Business Review, data suggests that some companies are creating real strategic advantage by adopting sustainability measures their competitors cannot easily match.
If you are looking for some eco-friendly tips to implement in your cannabis business, you’ve come to the right place. Here are five different ways to make your brand more sustainable:
1. Know How Your Products Are Made
If you do not grow your own cannabis, the first step to being more sustainable is ensuring that all of the ingredients or final products are made without unnecessary harmful chemicals or using too much energy. It is important to communicate with your suppliers to understand their water use, their energy use, and reduction initiatives as well as their waste conservation commitments.
According to Fashinnovation, using suppliers that are local to your area is also very important to reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. The more transportation that is involved throughout your supply chains, the more energy that is being used. Therefore, the less transport that is needed, the less fuel and greenhouse gasses that are being created.
2. Choose Environmentally Friendly Packaging
Shipping and packaging your products in more eco-friendly packaging is another way to incorporate sustainability into your business. Many packaging materials, like plastic mailers and packing peanuts, are hard to recycle and tend to create excess waste that degrades the environment and contributes to climate change. Instead, consider using packaging made of environmentally friendly materials such as post-consumer waste, bamboo, or compostable packaging, all of which will not generate more waste when disposed of correctly.
3. Donate to Organizations That Help the Environment
Research has found that consumers prefer brands who donate a portion of their earnings to charitable organizations. Seaweed Naturals, a cannabis retailer, gives five percent of their profits back to ocean education, protection, and restoration. To achieve these goals, the company supports EarthEcho International, a leading non-profit building a global youth movement to protect and restore the ocean, and AltaSea’s Project Blue, an ocean-related education and workforce development program. This is a great way to help combat climate change and entice new customers to shop from your brand.
4. Use Green Web Hosting
According to Chronos Agency, running a website is very energy-intensive. Dozens of servers around the world are needed to store and send data about your website to customers everywhere, and the energy needed to power these operations creates a lot of carbon emissions and requires the use of fossil fuels.
In this day and age, it is nearly impossible to run a successful business without a website, so in order to make your site more environmentally friendly, you can host it using green web hosting. Green web hosts are more environmentally conscious than typical web hosts, and help reduce the environmental impact of hosting a website through sponsoring eco-friendly initiatives, using sustainable energy, and more. A few popular green web hosts you can check out are GreenGeeks, DreamHost, or InMotion.
5. Implement an Effective Waste Disposal System
After the end product is made, over 150 million tons of cannabis waste is created each year in the U.S. alone. This includes plant stems, leaves, cannabis packaging materials, and more. Companies like GAIACA Waste Revitalization are working towards a solution by specifically composting cannabis plant waste. Even if you do not grow or manufacture your own cannabis products, it is important to discuss plant waste with your suppliers to make sure they are doing something with all of the parts they are not using instead of just throwing them away.
There are so many different ways to implement sustainable practices into your cannabis business, and these are just some points to help you get started. Talk with your customers and see if there are any specific initiatives they would like to see you make, because the more you communicate how you want to be more eco-conscious, the more consumers will want to purchase from your brand.