City officials incinerate seized cannabis on Long Island

WESTBURY, Long Island -- It sounds a little like frat boy humor, but the answer to the question of what to do with a four-ton pile of marijuana actually is to smoke it, according to city officials. However, the way in which that happens may not be the one that one might think. 

Mayor Eric Adams was joined by New York City Sheriff Anthony Miranda and other drug seizure law enforcement leaders on Wednesday at noon at the Reworld Thermomechanical Reuse facility -- an industrial incinerator that turns heat, from burning trash, into electricity. 

The mayor was touting his decision to dispose of cannabis seized by law enforcement by burning it at the Reworld facility. 

"This is what it's about," Adams said while holding up one of hundreds of one-pound bags of cannabis flower on display outside of the trash-to-electricity plant. There were also dozens of other cannabis products on display, in mass quantities, making up about four tons of pot-related trash. 

It was all seized from about 1,000 unlicensed cannabis sellers in the last four months, throughout the five boroughs. According to the mayor and the sheriff, the cannabis materials were laced with fentanyl, insecticides, and other harmful substances. 

The idea of burning it all is to make sure that nobody can get their hands on it, the mayor said. 

"[To] place it in a landfill," Mayor Adams said, "it just really opens the door to people going to the landfills and trying to salvage whatever they can."

Instead, the city decided to destroy its seized cannabis by adding it to the trash stream at the Reworld site. 

It uses a straightforward process. First, the cannabis is loaded into the facility, which is, notably, called Reworld Hempstead, even though it's located in Westbury. The cannabis products are then moved by front-end loaders and other heavy equipment into the rest of the incoming trash stream. It's all transferred to a storage room that's about the size of a small arena. 

From there, an industrial claw picks up the material by the ton and moves it to the incinerator. 

On Wednesday, though, that step of the process was done with an unorthodox twist: Mayor Adams was at the controls of the claw. Reworld had a technician guide the leader of the country's largest city through a process of picking up trash, including the cannabis materials, and using the claw to dump them into a giant chute that leads to the incinerator. 

The four tons of marijuana items were enough to serve as fuel for the incinerator to power a turbine creating enough electricity to energize about 80 homes for a month. 

The whole situation served as a good photo op and provided an opportunity for the mayor to talk about the 1,000 unlicensed shops his administration has shut down. He also pointed out that the city has inspected 4,000 shops in the last four months, and has padlocked or served cease-and-desist orders on about 2,000 of them.

Still, those 2,000 stores aren't officially out of business, and their seized wares, totaling about 100 tons of material, have yet to be disposed of.

Mayor Adams addressed those issues, at a news conference just before he took the controls of the megaclaw. 

"We've completed the list" of illegal shops to inspect, he said, adding, "We're gonna continue to go back and do a constant inspection."

As for the 100 tons of seized cannabis, the mayor addressed it and also talked about seizures of unlicensed cannabis products to come. 

"All of it will be destroyed," he said, adding that none of it would head to landfills. "I think the large amount will be [disposed of] here" at the Reworld facility, he said.