Can Indoor Pot Grows Be Environmentally Friendly?

1000 watt HID lamps provide light for the legal cannabis growing at the Humboldt Patient Resource Center. Manager Kevin Jodrey said the dispensary has plans to convert to 600 watt lamps to save energy. Photo: Sarah O’Leary

When the cannabis growers who brought Humboldt County wealth and fame in the ‘70s and ‘80s started moving their farms indoors, they did so in reaction to market and political conditions.

Cops and judges harassed outdoor growers. The great urban mass of pot smoking consumers demanded dense indoor-grown bud. They paid half again as much for it as they did for outdoor-grown, far more than enough to offset growers’ electricity costs.

The local economy soon became dependent on indoor growing, just as it depended on logging in decades past. A real estate bubble inflated. People didn’t protest because it generated so much income. Humboldt was enjoying another boom based on another unsustainable extractive industry.

Like the loggers before them,  some pot growers have ravaged local hillsides and waterways. And greedy indoor farmers have also wrought devastation in local rental homes, in distant coal and oil country, and in the common atmosphere.

Now, with steadily increasing energy prices and steadily decreasing weed prices, Humboldt looks poised to suffer another bust. Local landlords might be left with vacant, depreciated, moldy homes polluted with fertilizers and fungicides. Rural landowners might be left with properties littered with diesel, motor oil and mothballed generators.

To ward it off such a scenario, growers must embrace technology and techniques to mitigate their ecological footprint and improve their economic sustainability, and they must take advantage of the growing atmosphere of permissiveness to integrate into the mainstream economy.

Indoor’s Ecological Footprint

At Let It Grow hydroponics shop in Arcata, salesman Josh Sacks greets a a slow trickle of customers one quiet December afternoon.

Bottles containing plant snacks line the walls – everything from chemical nitrate fertilizers to organic compost teas. Sacks said that some growers, unwilling to delve into the “nitty-gritty of organic micronutrients,” use cheap chemical fertilizers. Novice growers also frequently allow their gardens to be overrun by spider mites. Then they apply the acrid pesticides Flouromite and Avid in great quantities to save their crop.

Such techniques produce a number of common waste products, including exhausted growing mediums, excess fertilizer, pesticides, fungicides and broken equipment.

But even organic indoor growers put toxins into the soil and air.

A small-time 3000 watt indoor grow uses twice as much electricity by itself as does the average Humboldt home. Beckie Menten, the City of Arcata’s Energy Program Specialist, said the city’s residential energy usage increased by 30 percent between 2000 and 2006.

“There’s not a whole lot that could account for that besides [proposition] 215,” she said. She calculates that California growers use 15 million kilowatt-hours a year.

Arcata growers have helped foil the city’s ambitious greenhouse-gas reduction goals. According to Menten’s calculations, each 3000-watt grow is responsible for about 10,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year. That’s the equivalent of flying round-trip from San Francisco to Singapore four times.

Organic and chemical fertilizers fill the shelves of a local hydroponics shop. Organic treatments are far superior, but even organic indoor farmers put toxins into the environment. Photo: Sarah O’Leary

Diesel Disasters

Rural growers use diesel generators to power their indoor farms. In exchange for inflated property values, their neighbors endure the constant roar of industrial-strength generators, clouds of carcinogenic smoke and the occasional Valdez scenario.

In May of 2008 a grower near Miranda spilled a thousand gallons of diesel into a tributary of Salmon Creek. Creek inhabitants – including salamanders and invertebrates – and other growers were nearly poisoned. The absentee landowner was fined more than $200,000, lost the property and later died, reportedly from the stress of the ordeal.

Just before that spill, two groups of southern Humboldt citizens organized in opposition to “diesel dope.” They called themselves “Put ‘Em in the Sun” and “Citizens Addressing Pot Pollution” (CAPP). Both groups aim to promote growing outdoors and educate consumers about the ecological effects of indoor buds.

“Outdoor growing is not without its sins,” conceded Miranda-area resident Tyce, an affiliate of CAPP. “Water use in the summer when its dry, all that.”

Fearful of repercussions for speaking out, he also said that indoor growing was understandable “back when we were getting flown hard.” But lately the CAMP helicopters have backed off, he said, leaving rural indoor growers little excuse for their conduct.

Tyce listens to three generators running all night long. Friends tell him of appliances blown out in weird grow-related power surges.

“The first time I saw one of these things, I thought it was the stupidest thing in the world,” he said, referring to diesel generators. “[It’s] the most unsustainable way of growing imaginable. Diesel scenes make slash-and-burn look kind of silly.” He pointed out that diesel generators lack emissions controls and, when run continuously, require an oil change every few days.

Melissa Martel of the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services said that she responded to six instances of diesel leaks in the hills last year. Sometimes, tiny leaks build up over time. One drop of diesel per second equals 400 gallons a year. Martel said she started digging around what looked like a small leak and eventually uncovered a giant inverted plume of diesel soaked into many tons of soil.

Freelance writer Kym Kemp, who is affiliated with “Put ‘Em in the Sun” and who covered the Salmon Creek incident for the Northcoast Journal, remembers that spill as “a hellish scene.”
Kemp dreams of cannabis gardens flowering under the sun and said that only Prohibition stands in the way. “My hope is that if they legalize marijuana the environment will be saved,” she said.

Mitigation

A row of fat succulents languishes in the display window at Let It Grow. Above them hangs a square lamp dotted with 120 weakly glowing light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

Sacks demonstrates that the lamp has more red LEDs than blue ones, producing a spectrum suited to flowering. It takes 45 watts and could replace a 250 watt high-intensity discharge (HID) lamp – if it worked efficiently. It costs $140, but would pay itself off quickly in energy savings, he said, especially if electricity costs go up.

Although they are barely in use now, Kevin Jodrey, cultivation director at the Humboldt Patient Resource Center, sees LEDs as “a very promising future technology, like hydrogen cars.”

Let It Grow owner Thomas Gronek said he reckoned that LED technology will improve to the point of usability in five years. “Most of the light from an HID is wasted,” he points out, because the plant can’t use it. But LEDs produce no heat or sound, last for years, and can be individually localized onto plant foliage.”

Jodrey said that he must grow indoors because his patients need medicine with consistent qualities, and he cannot achieve such consistency outdoors. But he said the center is incorporating energy-saving features in its new grow room in Aldergrove Industrial Park.

They’re switching to digital ballasts, which are 15 percent more efficient than their magnetic counterparts. They’re also cutting their lamp wattage by about 40 percent. Jodrey believes he can grow the same amount of product with the smaller lamps by getting more units of light per watt onto the plants.

Gronek and his store manager, Joanna Berg, say that improved hood designs can help growers do just that. They also suggest growers mount their lamps on mover tracks, which reduce the number of fixtures necessary for a given grow room. Another energy efficient improvement would be to use fluorescents instead of HIDs for most of the vegetative growth period.

Sacks suggests growers concerned about their electricity use switch to a “sea of green” cultivation technique. With this method, growers cultivate bonsai plants. They grow many more plants but only for half the length of time. The method squeezes a higher volume of product out of each kilowatt.

Some growers try to get as much bud as possible out of as few plants as possible, thinking that their plant numbers are legally relevant. But the Humboldt County Code prescribes a limit of 100 square feet of garden canopy for each marijuana patient. There is no limit to the number of plants or watts allowed. Sacks suggests growing 100 tiny plants on one square foot each, for one month.

Even though he’s a legal grower, Jodrey said that he’s had problems getting rid of agricultural wastes from his grow rooms, such as shake and stems, because local farmers are afraid to possess large quantities of weed. He hopes that the increasing legitimacy of the marijuana industry will aleviate such problems.

Illegal growers are loath to draw attention to themselves and often dispose of their wastes in a surreptitous manner. Some toss bags of the common growing medium rock wool into the forest. They crush up mercury-filled HID lamps and toss them into public dumpsters. They pour fertilizers down the drain, which can cause fish-asphyxiating algae blooms in streams and in the ocean.

Eddie Tanner, an organic farmer in Arcata, said he won’t take growers’ exhausted soil because he’s not sure what’s in it. The presence of chemical fertilizers, pesticides or fungicides in his soil could endanger his farm’s organic certification. Tanner suggests that growers dump old soil in a compost pile and let the rain wash through it. Another option is to take it to Freshwater Farms in Eureka, which accepts it free of charge.

Rock wool is made out of spun mineral fiber. As long as it is not full of fungicides or pesticides, Tanner suggests churning it into the ground, where it will aerate the soil. The same goes for liquid fertilizer. It is best disposed of by pouring it into a compost pile, where microbes can eat it.

HID and fluorescent bulbs must be disposed of at Hazardous Waste in Eureka, which is open on the first Saturday of every month from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Humboldt Hydroponics also accepts them for $5 apiece. 

To eliminate the necessity for chemical pesticides, Sacks suggests applying neem oil to the foliage of the plants early and regularly to ward off mites before they can establish themselves.
Indoor growers who use generators should consider installing containment tanks and automatic cut-off valves around their fuel tanks, Kemp said. They should also consider switching to nontoxic biodiesel. The vast quantities of used motor oil should be disposed of at proper       waste transfer centers.

Ultimate Futility

Government policies towards energy and marijuana markets and consumers’ preference for indoor bud ­– although it contains less THC than outdoor and fewer cannabinoids overall – have fueled the indoor boom. Legal weed and a carbon tax may bring the next economic bust. Growers and dispensaries should plan accordingly.

Even if the end of Prohibition makes growing in the hills and in bedrooms obselete, the ecological benefits will be a silver lining. Besides cannabis, no plant in the world is grown entirely indoors. In the future, high-grade marijuana will likely be grown in places well suited to its cultivation, perhaps further inland, in greenhouses with supplemental LED lighting.

Joe at Humboldt Hydroponics was refreshingly laconic when asked how to improve the ecological sensitivity of an indoor grow. “As long as that light’s on,” he said,  “Ain’t nothing environmentally friendly about it.”

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