How do you destroy $77M of pot?

After running afoul of Health Canada this summer, Ontario cannabis producer CannTrust is now planning to destroy $77 million of its inventory and assets.

The question, unanswered in the company’s Monday announcement, is: How do you destroy that much cannabis? Though the final total is still unclear, it appears to be thousands and thousands of kilograms.

Health Canada provided some guidance for the National Post on Tuesday.

One acceptable method involves shredding the cannabis and mixing it with water and cat litter — or “other types of inorganic material” before composting or disposing it.

The point is to render the product unusable, said Trina Fraser, a cannabis lawyer who specializes in regulatory compliance.

“They’re not going to put it in a big pile outside the building and spark it up — that’s for sure,” she said.

In the early 2000s, as a rookie OPP officer, Carolle Dionne was occasionally tasked with bringing bags of seized cannabis to the lumber mill in Mattawa, Ont. — a small town near North Bay — where it was incinerated.

“We’d do that in the middle of the night sometimes,” said Dionne, now a staff sergeant with the OPP’s communications department.

The OPP still maintains a network of third-party facilities with incinerators that adhere to local environmental regulations to burn seized drugs, the force said Tuesday. Live cannabis plants can be incinerated, but are also buried in landfills.

In the cannabis industry, destruction and disposal happens to be routine procedure. Crops are trimmed, others are defective in some way, buds fall on the floor, products are pulled out by quality assurance screening — and none of it can just be tossed in a garbage bin.

Health Canada requires all waste to be weighed and documented by two witnesses. In the case of CannTrust, the ministry will send its own witness, Health Canada said on Tuesday.

CannTrust’s licence was partially suspended last month after Health Canada

THEY’RE NOT GOING TO PUT IT IN A BIG PILE OUTSIDE AND ... SPARK IT UP.

found the company was growing cannabis in unlicensed areas of its facility in Pelham, Ont.

The company said it wouldn’t give full details on the amount of products destroyed until the products are actually destroyed but clarified that the $77 million includes $65 million in inventory and $12 million in “biological assets.” CannTrust said Tuesday the total destruction will also include unlicensed products it is working to retrieve from customers.

The product could be easier to destroy than it sounds, according to a former employee, Nick Lalonde — the man who says his tip to Health Canada led to the audit this summer. Before he quit in May, Lalonde was responsible for destruction — at one point his title was Master of Destruction.

He said his job was to pick up all the waste and product returns, take them outside, lay them in a big patch and drive over them with a mulcher. “Myself I could destroy 800 to 1,000 plants in two hours,” he said.