(This is an abridged version of a story that appears in the May-June issue of Marijuana Business Magazine.)
Marijuana waste gives entrepreneurs an opportunity to enter an emerging cannabis sector that turns plant refuse and post-extraction leftovers into marketable products that range from animal bedding to construction materials.
Cannabis growers and processors, for their part, can make a buck by selling leftover plant material.
And, more broadly, the nascent space offers an industry long criticized for its heavy electricity and water use a chance to bolster its green image.
“If we can use this resource on the back end – the (growing) media waste, the fibrous material, everything they might throw away that they can’t use in the growing and processing – we have the opportunity to make the Earth habitable again,” said John Whiteside, who started a Colorado-based cannabis waste recycling company, IHR, in 2011.
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