New York officials are rolling out a broad plan to encourage environmental sustainability and set energy use standards within the state’s legal marijuana industry. It’s part of regulators’ broader goal of promoting economic, environmental and social sustainability in the emerging sector.

Over the past several months, the Office of Cannabis Management (OCM) has put out new energy and environmental rules for both medical marijuana and adult-use cannabis businesses, and this week, it published an overview of several key initiatives.

“The Office has circulated regulations for both medical and adult-use licensees designed to minimize the adverse environmental impacts of the cannabis industry within the State,” OCM said on a new sustainability webpage that launched on Monday. Regulators’ initial focus is “on energy use standards and carbon and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions management, waste minimization, and the protection of air, water, and land, amongst other things,” the announcement said.

Among the initiatives detailed in the new guidance document is a program that requires cannabis licensees to install energy meters and track usage with a program called PowerScore.

“The resource consumption metrics licensees report through PowerScore can be used to build a benchmark that can serve as a guideline for making future reductions in resource use and associated operating costs,” OCM explained. “The Office will use the data reported by licensees through PowerScore to gauge the industry’s adherence to State climate laws, identify areas for efficiency improvement to benefit the State and national industry, and guide future policy decisions.”

Licensees in both the medical and adult-use markets are also required “to engage in resource tracking and reporting to develop a benchmark of their energy, water, associated emissions use.”

Regulators noted that New York’s legalization law, the Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA) prioritized environmental protection and improving the state’s resiliency to climate change.

Other energy-related regulations include more efficient standards for horticultural lighting systems and what OCM says are “nation-leading limitations on the use of refrigerants in heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) and dehumidification equipment.”

The new rules also prohibit fossil fuel combustion as a primary energy source for marijuana businesses.

Recently revised packaging, labeling, marketing and advertising (PLMA) regulations also emphasize the need to minimize packaging waste and support recycling, OCM said.

OCM officials discussed the sustainability measures at a Cannabis Advisory Board meeting on Tuesday.

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure, and you can’t track what you don’t measure,” OCM policy director John Kagia said at the meeting, according to Spectrum News 1.

Growers will have a year to submit their sustainability plans to state officials, while the energy tracking tool PowerScore will launch early next month.

Spectrum reported that Kagia said growers must find a way to be energy efficient while not driving up product costs or making regulated stores less competitive against illicit sales.

“We’re very intentional, very conscious about trying to keep the cost down because this is already a high-cost state to operate in,” he said.

On its new webpage, OCM framed sustainability as an important goal of marijuana studies, highlighting that state research licensees might want to investigate more sustainable packaging, how to reduce the use of plastic and how to best manage resource use to most efficiently cultivate cannabis.

Other options might include projects “that examine the role of cannabis in climate justice and foster economic development, job creation or technology advancements that can be translated to other State industries.”

As for social and economic sustainability, OCM said the adult-use energy and sustainability regulations were “developed with consideration to legacy growers and less capitalized licensees.”

“This includes aspects like holding smaller-scale cultivation licensees to less stringent standards and allowing them two licensing periods to come into compliance with certain energy and environmental standards,” the office explained. “This structure was designed to allow licensees authorized to cultivate the opportunity to determine if they are eligible to apply for and receive financial incentives from their utility services provider to exceed the Office’s prescriptive energy standards.”

OCM also partnered with the state’s Energy Research and Development Authority and Resource Innovation Institute to offer free webinars on cannabis resource efficiency.

Together, the new rules “form an overall approach to environmental sustainability that is in alignment with the State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA),” OCM said in its new overview of the program.

The environmental impacts of cannabis cultivation have been topics of discussion by policymakers and law enforcement even before legalization, but the emergence of marijuana as a regulated industry has also allowed for better tracking and management of resource use.

Separate researched published earlier this year, for example, found that growing cannabis plants outside can drastically reduce environmental impacts compared to indoor production—lessening greenhouse gas emissions, soil acidification and the pollution of local waterways.

“Results show that outdoor cannabis agriculture can be 50 times less carbon-emitting than indoor production,” says the study, published in June by the journal Agricultural Science and Technology.

New York began setting rules meant to promote environmental awareness around cannabis in 2022. The rules required businesses to submit an environmental sustainability program and explore the possibility of reusing cannabis packaging. Lawmakers there also explored promoting industry recycling programs and cannabis packaging made from hemp rather than synthetic plastics, though neither proposal was enacted.

Across the country, California has taken some specific steps to ameliorate environmental concerns. For example, officials announced in 2021 that they were soliciting concept proposals for a marijuana tax-funded program aimed at helping small cannabis cultivators with environmental clean-up and restoration efforts.

The following year, California awarded $1.7 in grant money to sustainable cannabis growers, part of a planned $6 million in total funding.

A 2023 report from the International Coalition on Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Justice, meanwhile, drew attention to the negative impacts of unregulated drug production in areas like the Amazon Rainforest and the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Attempts to protect those critical ecosystems, the report warned, “will fail as long as those committed to environmental protection neglect to recognize, and grapple with, the elephant in the room”—namely “the global system of criminalized drug prohibition, popularly known as the ‘war on drugs.’”

And two years ago a pair of members of Congress who oppose legalization pushed the Biden administration to study the environmental impacts of marijuana cultivation, writing that they had “reservations regarding marijuana cultivation’s subsequent emissions and believe more research is needed on this industry’s rapidly growing demands on our country’s energy systems, along with its effects on our environment.”

Hemp cultivation also has environmental considerations, but some indicators suggest the crop might have net positive effects on the planet. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced $6.2 million in grant funding to research hempcrete—a concrete alternative made with hemp—and other agriculture-based building materials. Other government funding has gone toward researching construction insulation made from hemp.

In 2022, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a report on Europe’s hemp industry boom, recognizing that the cannabis crop was an increasingly important economic commodity that could also help the region achieve bold climate-related goals.

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