I would like to hear about others in the community who are working towards or are interested in zero-waste cultivation. If this is important to you too, please get in touch with us.
This is a great article from High Times in a really great subject to discuss. One thing I find really exciting about being part of the emerging cannabis industry are the technological advances that we are making to growing plants indoors.
I think that these advances will translate directly to the food industry and change the way we feed our planet.
I am part of a small American company called Growpito. We keep this thought in mind and everything that we do. We believe that we have developed a grow medium that can save a significant amount of water and be entirely reusable moving towards zero waste cultivation.
Check us out at www.growpito.com #Growpito#cannabis#watersavings
Indoor growing is not sustainable unless you are able to use renewable energy. If we want to be sustainable in the cannabis industry we need to move away from indoor cultivation, this is a power hungry method of farming, with great CO2 outputs that contribute to climate change.
solar power, living organics, LED lighting and recycling waste (leaves/stems) through vermi-compost or traditional composting are a few paths growers can take on the road to sustainability. the main concern would be lighting and CO2 like llurch mentioned. even though the plants use CO2.
bio char also sequesters carbon… is complete sustainability achievable indoors? I’m not sure but we can take a lot of steps in the right direction.
I have found many ways to successfully operate a zero-waste indoor cultivation facility. @llurch is correct in the idea that one has to generate power to accomplish this. I grow in the Southeast Arizona where we average 360 days of annual sunshine, so integrating solar energy can help supply the power needs of the facility almost full-time. Using efficient lighting arrays combined with the solar energy allow us to grow off-grid the majority of the time.
I have found a number of interesting ways to supplement CO2 as well. I use a vermiposting process (worms) for disposing all the biological waste from the facility. Worms and decomposition output a negligible amount of CO2 which the plants can use to more optimally photosynthesize. By far my favorite way to supplement CO2 is to use the off-gas from the brewery next door. It’s a free way to utilize CO2 from one biological process to support another!
