Ken Newburger has become very familiar with the issue of medical cannabis in Mississippi over the years.

He worked alongside Mississippians for Compassionate Care, the group behind the Medical Marijuana 2020 campaign, to place one of the state’s two medical cannabis measures, Initiative 65, on Mississippi’s ballot, where voters ultimately approved it on Election Day.

RELATED: Two Competing Measures to Appear on Ballot in Mississippi

“As the campaign was coming to an end, it became clear that the next step was going to be, how do we best serve the patients of Mississippi, now that they’re going to have access to medical marijuana?” Newburger told Cannabis Business Times and Cannabis Dispensary. “I’m really excited to see this industry come to fruition after almost three years’ worth of work that people put in to pass medical marijuana here in Mississippi.”

Throughout November and into December, Newburger rounded up a group of people who were interested in launching a medical cannabis association in the state, and the Mississippi Medical Marijuana Association was born.

The organization launched Dec. 15 with a group of associate members that are looking to operate cultivation, testing, transportation, manufacturing, extraction and retail businesses in the state, once the Mississippi State Department of Health establishes the program’s regulations and issues business licenses.

The association’s primary goal is to provide networking opportunities and governmental affairs representation to the businesses that are eventually licensed in Mississippi’s medical cannabis program, as well as offer educational and informational resources to the public.

Newburger plans to work with lawmakers and regulators at the state capital to ensure a smooth rollout for the state’s program, as well as connect with those in other states to learn more broadly about best practices in regulated cannabis programs throughout the country.

Mississippi’s voter-approved medical cannabis legalization initiative gives the Department of Health until July 1, 2021 to establish rules and regulations for the industry and the licensing process.

“It’s a little nebulous right now because you had the big rollout for the COVID vaccine and handling our large caseload of COVID cases seems to be the big priority, and that’s appropriate, I think, for the Department of Health,” Newburger said. “We’ve got a good bit of time before we have more clarity on exactly what [a medical cannabis program] looks like.”

The biggest challenge for the state’s prospective businesses, he said, is the holding pattern that they will find themselves in for the next almost nine months as they await a regulatory framework for the program.

“It’s a strange position for a lot of businesses to try to draft their plans but also think that they need to be compliant with the rules and regulations that will be put forth,” Newburger said. “Trying to balance those two ideas will be their biggest challenge.”

The Department of Health has until Aug. 15, 2021 to issue business licenses and patient ID cards, and Newburger said it will take additional time to get plants in the ground and medicine in the hands of the state’s patient base.

“What’s really exciting for the market as a whole is that there hasn’t been an overwhelming support for almost anything in Mississippi like there has been for medical marijuana,” he said. “We won Initiative 65 with 74% of the [pro-cannabis] vote, and that means I think that we’ll have a large participation of Mississippians in the market, and that’s just going to be great for the state."

When Cannabis 2.0 launched in Canada with the sale of cannabis edibles, beverages and vape products, Marshall Posner, chief marketing officer for vertically integrated licensed producer Delta 9, said the company wanted to do more to ensure cannabis packaging and waste was being dealt with responsibly.

While packaging for dried flower and other cannabis products can generally be recycled as part of Canada’s Blue Box recycling program, many vape products are designated as special waste and cannot be recycled in the same way, meaning that they often end up in landfills.

“As we’ve seen these products become more prevalent in our stores, we felt we needed to do something in a responsible fashion to help address … where this packaging and cannabis waste is ending up,” Posner told Cannabis Business Times and Cannabis Dispensary.

This led Delta 9 to partner with Canadian recycling company Emterra Environmental to create a sustainable recycling program for cannabis packaging and disposable vape pens, as well as a landfill diversion program for vape cartridges, to help the Canadian cannabis industry transition to a circular economy.

Emterra Environmental was founded 44 years ago as a Vancouver-based recycling company.

“Unlike some of our industry peers, we don’t see ourselves as a waste disposal company or a landfill operator,” said Paulina Leung, VP of corporate strategy and business development for Emterra Environmental. Her mother started the company, which has since grown to 1,100 employees, 15 recycling plants and over 800 trucks. “Our true core is to be a recycler and to help ensure any kind of material we extract from the earth gets to be used over and over again.”

Emterra Environmental has moved beyond its initial role as a recycling and waste management company, Leung said, and now works directly with companies, such as Delta 9, that want to take responsibility for their products and work to increase sustainability in the marketplace.

“That’s where we have a similar ethos with Delta 9,” Leung said. “We’re both vertically integrated companies in our respective industries, and instead of waiting for government to tell us what to do with cannabis packaging and vape products, we found each other and we created this customer program … to help Delta 9 continue to grow in a sustainable way.”

Delta 9 launched in 2013 as one of Canada’s original LPs, and currently operates eight retail stores across Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan in addition to its cultivation operations. The company will open a ninth store next week and aims to open another 11 retail locations by the end of 2021.

“We think of ourselves as a socially responsible company, and we’ve participated in a variety of green initiatives or recycling programs that the industry has started and stopped over the past year and a half,” Posner said. “We were excited about this and it seemed like a good fit for us to restart or relaunch a new program that would ultimately be sustainable for the industry.”

Leung added: “We saw other programs in the industry come and go, and in seeing those programs come and go, we saw that there were opportunities and ways to make our program more effective, more efficient, and also more authentic.”

The first component of the program allows consumers to recycle cannabis packaging similar to Canada’s well-established Blue Box program, while a second component focuses on landfill diversion for disposable vape cartridges and vape pens.

“Of course, landfilling is absolutely the worst,” Leung said. “Things stay in landfills forever—it never decomposes. So, the second option was to recover the energy from the cartridges. That’s what makes our program unique.”

To participate in the recycling program, consumers can simply bring their empty containers and vape products to any Delta 9 retail location and deposit them into boxes labeled “Flower – Recycling” or “Vapes – Landfill Diversion.”

The program accepts cannabis packaging and disposable vape cartridges and vape pens from any licensed producer, regardless of brand. Consumers can simply bring their empty containers and vape products to any Delta 9 retail location and deposit them into boxes labeled “Flower – Recycling” or “Vapes – Landfill Diversion.”

Consumers are asked to wrap the vape cartridges in individual bags before putting them into the box to make it easier for the recycler to sort the cartridges from the pens, which ultimately increases recyclability, Leung said.

The contents of the flower recycling box will be picked up and delivered to ReVital Polymers’ plastics recycling facility in Sarnia, Ontario, where post-consumer plastics are processed into engineered resin products.

The collected vape pens and vape cartridges are processed at Emterra Environmental’s partner electronics recycling facility, where the pens are separated from the cartridges for processing. The battery, plastic and metal are recovered from the vape pens, while the cartridges are handled as special waste and sent to an energy-from-waste facility for processing. All of this happens domestically in Canada, and no waste is shipped abroad.

“When the recycling is full on our end, there’s a bag inside,” Posner said. “We take it, put it in a box and book a pick-up online from Canada Post, and that’s it. It’s a real simple process. I think that’s what I really like about this program. If you look at successful programs, they’re really quite simple. There aren’t all of these steps that you have to adhere to.”

Emterra Environmental and Delta 9 have created educational Q&As to display on their websites and in-store to help both consumers and Delta 9’s retail staff understand the process and why it is important.

In the several days since the program’s launch, online and in-store response has been positive, Posner said.

“Our customers have been asking us for months when we’ll be introducing vape recycling or some kind of a vape program or … recycling program for cannabis packaging,” he said. “I think for a lot of them, they’re like, ‘Oh, good, it’s about time.’”

The long-term success of any diversion program requires the industry to participate, Leung added, and she and Posner hope that other LPs will take notice and join in.

“Delta 9 certainly led this initiative and I really hope they have set the example and other LPs will join because when industry acts as a whole, not only will the program be more cost-effective for everybody, but it will also show government that they don’t need to regulate the industry from a waste management perspective,” Leung said. “Industry is taking responsibility for the end-of-life management of cannabis and vape products and packaging, they’re being proactive, and I think government appreciates that. From a compliance or government affairs perspective and from achieving a cost-effective program, industry working together will result in the best outcome for all the players.”

Creating packaging with circular end-of-life solutions is not a competitive issue, she added, and should instead be something that the entire industry collaboratively addresses.

“As soon as Marshall and I started talking, it was very like-minded,” Leung said. “We saw that the industry is growing very quickly, and sometimes when an industry is growing very quickly, some of the elements of sustainability take a while to catch up. … I hope this is a launching pad for a nationwide program that will be able to manage all the cannabis packaging, as well as the vape pens and the vape cartridges. … I really hope that the industry hears this call to action and works together.”

The partnership between Delta 9 and Emterra Environmental relies on shared expenses, which will ultimately contribute to the long-term viability of the program, Posner said.

“The packaging is as diverse as the types of products that are held in them, and on the spectrum of really recyclable to terrible [and] not recyclable, the packaging will fall anywhere on that spectrum,” Leung said. “What we want to do in this program is to take a look at each brand and each type of packaging available and to be able to give some analysis and recommendations to the LPs to say, ‘This type of packaging is really good—can you transition more of your packaging to this type?’ Then, we’ll also be honest and say, ‘This type of packaging is not good, so can we work together and find some other alternatives?’”

“This was important to our employees, it’s important to our customers, and quite frankly, we think it’s a responsibility of any company,” Posner added. “Whether [it’s] a cannabis company or another that is producing waste and putting waste into the marketplace, [it should] have a solution on the backend or at least contribute to a solution on the backend to help deal with the waste."

Mark Toigo, a cannabis investor from Pennsylvania, has filed a federal lawsuit to strike down Missouri’s requirement that medical cannabis business licenses are owned by residents, according to St. Louis Public Radio.

The voter-approved constitutional amendment that legalized medical cannabis in 2018 requires licenses to be majority owned by residents who have lived in Missouri for at least one year prior to filing the application, the news outlet reported.

Toigo, a minority owner in Organic Remedies MO Inc., which holds three dispensary licenses, one cultivation license and one manufacturer license in the state, argued in his lawsuit, which was filed Dec. 11 against the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services and its director, Randall Williams, that the state is discriminating against non-residents and violating the dormant clause of the U.S. Constitution by enforcing the residency requirement, St. Louis Public Radio reported.

Toigo alleged that the residency requirement prohibits him from investing any additional funding into a Missouri company if it increases his ownership stakes above 49%, which limits his “economic opportunities in Missouri’s nascent marijuana industry,” according to St. Louis Public Radio.