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Personal goal to resolve stink of smoking weed indoors

Published on April 21, 2022 by David Wylie

Photo: David Wylie/the oz.

Kevin Shale knows well the plight of going outside to get high.

The ex-Winnipeg resident says Manitoba winters aren’t at all conducive to enjoyable smoke sessions outdoors.

“In Manitoba you’re sitting in the car freezing to death. Or you go for a walk, and everyone has to huddle and try to block the wind so you can try to light this thing,” he says. “It’s been a personal goal of mine for years to be resolve the odour issues with smoking indoors.”

Shale, who’s president of Greentech Environmental, has been fine-tuning solutions to eliminate smoke and odours indoors.

The company’s solutions for smokers and vapers are particularly geared toward those who live in a rental unit or a condo building, where lighting up inside can create problems with neighbours or landlords.

“I’m confident with our new offerings—based on personal testing as well as customer satisfaction and referrals—that it achieves just that,” he says. “Ultimately, if you’re able to consume more liberally then you might be more likely to buy that strong gas cannabis rather than a vape cartridge.”

Greentech’s Pureair Active HEPA+ with ODOguard model uses a filter with a special coating that can absorb odours. He’s hoping to make the personal units more widely available through cannabis retail stores.

Photo: Contributed

It has a sensor that can recognize smoke and odour, and it glows red when it’s smoky, he says. As the unit purifies the air, the light will turn orange and then green.

“I call it lowering your heat-score,” says Shale with a laugh.

“It’s designed that you can literally put it on a table, have people sit around it and you just blow at the bottom. It’s strong enough it’ll suck everything in, filter out the smoke and the odour, and then blow the clean air out the top. The candles and the incense and the orange sprays are definitely outdated. There’s nothing like walking into a house that smells like cannabis and oranges.”

While they focus on residential, commercial, and educational institution air purification, Shale says he realized Greentech’s offerings could be useful for the cannabis industry through his friends.

“Since 2017, I had some friends who had medical grows. They were complaining about having constant issues with powdered mildew. They were not able to find anything to control it. We happened to have solutions that could be implemented for that but just had to be modified in order to be scaled to meet the need of a grow room,” he says.

“We were able to consistently solve those problems with our friends that had medical grows. The biggest benefit for using our air purifiers would be reducing the risk of having a higher microbial count in your final product.”

It’s a preventative tool to keep levels in check and reduce the impact of a recall or a failed microbial test, he says, both of which are a costly setback for cannabis producers.

That led Shale to attend trade shows and try to build up the cannabis segment. (Greentech is at Booth 7 at the BC Cannabis Summit.)

The units are beginnign to make their way into cannabis facilities.

Kyra Horvath, master grower at Pineapple Buds, says she has a unit installed at her micro.

“We particularly like the pureAir 750 unit used in our dry/trim room, as it’s compact and easy to maintain but most importantly, works efficiently to reduce airborne pathogens without the use of ozone.”

Check out out Greentech’s website for more info.