Kickstart: Cleaning the ocean, one cannabis product at a time

Who wants a feel-good story about a mom-and-pop business that's working hard to clean plastic pollution from rivers and oceans?

And what if that company also happens to specialize in recreational marijuana?

Ocean Cannabis Co. is a California company that began with medical marijuana and expanded into recreational products. As the company grew, owners Mary and Patrick Ersig — who previously also ran homeless shelters in Michigan and California — said they wanted to make sure their packaging didn't add to the plastic waste issue.

"They wanted to do their part to rid the world's oceans of plastics and decided to make recycled plastic a central theme of their brand," the company website states.

In an interview with Cannabis Dispensary, the couple said they source their packaging from Oceanworks, which collects bottles and other products from waterways in Haiti, and processors such as Sana Packaging, which reached out to the cannabis industry with its containers in 2019. (Jim Johnson wrote about Sana in November.)

Ocean Cannabis says one of its pre-roll plastic cannisters is made from the equivalent of 15 straws.

"When you smoke Ocean Cannabis products, you help clean the ocean and save the earth," the company says.

Yum Foods, the corporate owner of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut restaurants, has announced that it is doing away with expanded polystyrene foodservice packaging.

The move, it said in a Feb. 27 news release, is because of what it saw as its "responsibility to make a positive impact on the environment."

Mind you, they did this the same week KFC began selling chicken sandwiches that used doughnuts instead of bread. So ...

Sure. That sounds like a company totally thinking about responsibility.

Saturday (yes, Leap Day) in Atlanta is the U.S. Olympic Team trials for the marathon. Starting at noon, a record 523 athletes will line up for a shot at going to the 2020 Olympics. Only the top three men and top three women will make the team.

So there's a lot riding on having a perfect 26.2-mile race. That means the athletes have been fine-tuning their running shoes, their sleep, their food and especially their on-course nutrition. If you're a good enough athlete to qualify for the Olympic Trials, you're rarely going to just grab a random cup from a table. So to prepare, some have been training with Gatorade — some prefer it mixed weak, others may want it strong — or Skratch or Maurten or maybe some homemade concoction. Maybe one of those brands is a sponsor, which means you absolutely need to make sure you grab their product.

Each runner is allowed to place six of their own plastic sport bottles out on the course. So if you do the math, that means race organizers need to figure out precisely where 3,138 bottles will be perfectly placed so each runner gets exactly what they expect, and when they want it.

Runner's World has an interesting breakdown of what exactly that means, involving bottles, bottle holders, 60 separate tables, color-coded tablecloths and more. It's enough to make a Lean Six Sigma manager weep.