For 26 years, Olivier Dehon worked in the corporate sector, ending up as chief financial officer for Xerox in the UK and Ireland before retiring four years ago. Last month he delivered his first consignment of high-strength cannabis.
Dehon’s dope is legal and above board, produced to supply the UK’s burgeoning market for medical cannabis on prescription. What’s more, Dehon and his colleagues believe it is the first carbon-neutral indoor weed grown anywhere in the world.
They hope that their plan to produce carbon-neutral cannabis could show the way to securing the supply chain for all kinds of energy-intensive horticulture in the UK, as climate-related weather fluctuations increasingly imperil the supply from overseas, and soaring energy prices make production in the UK increasingly uneconomical.
Despite its reputation as a mind-altering drug beloved of hippies and other eco-conscious types, cannabis – and particularly illicit cannabis – is not very green. Indoor cultivation of 1kg of cannabis requires about 6,000kWh of energy, with a mammoth carbon footprint of 1,400kg, according to recent research by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, the EU’s drugs watchdog.
That means just one joint, rolled with a third of a gram of weed, has the same carbon impact as driving a plug-in hybrid electric car almost three miles.
Scaled up, the impact is humongous. In the Netherlands alone, the amount of electricity stolen for cannabis production in 2021 was about 1bn kWh, equivalent to the annual household electricity demand of Rotterdam, a city of 650,000 people.
Under the blindingly bright lights of Glass Pharms’ state-of-the-art £20m production facility nestled in a discreet location in the Wiltshire countryside, it is easy to see why. Hundreds of LEDs shine on to pallets loaded with cannabis plants, which make their way on rails through growing chambers. The air temperature is several degrees warmer than the cold winter air outside. All variables are controlled to produce the most perfectly balanced cannabis crop possible.