Specialist cannabis producer Glass Pharms, which claims to be the UK’s first carbon-neutral grower of the medicinal herb, has completed construction of its £20 million production facility in Wiltshire.
The company’s energy comes from an adjacent anaerobic digestion (AD) plant, and in the future the company also hopes to utilise CO2 generated by the facility. The new greenhouse also includes supplementary lighting, rainwater harvesting, and water and air recycling.
Mark Heley, Glass Pharms’ head of external relations, told the Guardian, “The essential problem we’re solving is a problem which goes way beyond cannabis in the UK, which is how do we actually do energy intensive horticulture. What we’ve done here is we look at the fundamental problem, which is that if you’re growing plants indoors in the UK, in this climate, the factors that you’ve got to have are basically heat, power and, particularly in the case of cannabis, carbon dioxide.
“Since the outputs from an anaerobic digestion plant is power and then, effectively, the waste heat – we are talking about a very considerable amount of heat, more than a megawatt – and also it produces carbon dioxide, we’ve got inputs to our system that are not only the outputs of the adjoining plant, they are waste products of the adjoining plant.”
Chief Financial Officer Olivier Dehon added that the company had chosen cannabis as it would be unprofitable to grow traditional greenhouse crops. “You could [grow peppers] but then the risk for an investor and for us goes higher and you have to be sailing a lot closer to the wind. The margin for error is a lot smaller.
“If you were to try to do cucumbers here, you would not be able to do it. Because the margin and the price at which you could sell a cucumber versus imported ones, you’ll struggle to be competitive. Even if everybody takes the minimum margin, and even if there’s no greedy corporate in the process, it doesn’t matter. You can’t make it work at this point.”