Deep Roots, Green Future: Purple Hills, path to land stewardship

This post is presented by our media partner Grow Opportunity
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The area surrounding Creemore, Ontario, has long been an agricultural frontier. From the first settlers who carved out an existence on its rocky hills, to the modern farms surviving and thriving through technological and business-model innovations. At Purple Hills, our team and families have contributed to that history, from those first farm settlements to one of the newest legal farm enterprises – cannabis cultivation and processing. 

Today, our land management and production practices look to the past for inspiration, while leveraging the technologies at our disposal to maximize efficiency and minimize our environmental impact. We have dedicated ourselves to producing high quality products through sustainable, regenerative and transparent practices. 

This year, we formed The Purple Hills Centre, a not-for-profit organization that operates our animal sanctuary, manages and promotes our most important environmental initiatives and works to better understand the potential of regenerative agriculture for carbon sequestration and soil health.  

The Purple Bin Program 

Our most ambitious and impactful project to date has been the widely adopted Purple Bin program – a cannabis packaging waste collection and upcycling initiative. Since starting the program in January of 2024, we have collected almost 4,000,000 grams of packaging and hardware waste from 800 cannabis retailers across the country. As we collect and sort, we’re constantly searching for the best upcycling opportunities for all the materials.

The immediate uptake, enthusiastic participation and positive feedback from retailers and consumers alike has powered the program to heights we only dreamed about; its overall success is incredibly humbling. Not only have these bins diverted waste from streets, parks and landfills, they’ve served as a motivational spark for the industry to adopt more sustainable packaging solutions, with numerous industry participants signing our petition to change the rules and regulations that contribute so heavily to the waste issue, in the first place. We believe that a true partnership can exist between producers, retailers, suppliers and the government to tackle this waste issue from the imperfect regulations that contribute to excessive cannabis packaging through to the decisions made across the entire supply chain. 

As the hundreds of industry friends and community members who have visited our events and tours know, the Purple Hills Centre sits atop the beautiful Ten Hill. From there you get an incredible view of the whole landscape; a tapestry of rolling green fields, a great lake, big sky, colourful crops, grazing livestock, and of course, our fellow farmers and stewards working the land like so many before them. 

This portrait of connectivity is what Purple Hills aspires to – an ecosystem that is enriched and supported, not exploited, by its stewards. We’re proud to call Creemore home and we’re even prouder to bring this pursuit of positive growth far beyond the valley where this dream was born. 

Peter Miller, the founder and CEO of Purple Hills, is a lifelong entrepreneur with a focus on businesses and industries with the greatest potential for environmental and economic value creation. 

This post was originally published by our media partner here.