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Tuesday, September 11, 2018
5 Best Practices for Cannabis Extraction Laboratory Safety
5 Best Practices for Cannabis Extraction Laboratory Safety
Supplement - Extraction Essentials
From employee protection
to adhering to widely recognized manufacturing standards, follow these
tips to ensure a safe working environment for your employees and your
business.
August 27, 2018
Markus Roggen, Ph.D., VP, Extraction, Outco
Cannabis extraction has a dark
history of burned-down apartment buildings, exploded cabins, toxic
byproducts in extracts, and oils of questionable quality. With a
maturing industry that is stepping out of the shadows and into
regulatory oversight, many of those dangers will be mitigated through
rules and regulations, but a large burden still lies with the extraction
operator.
Operators have reduced the risk of commercial cannabis
extractors burning down due to compliance and the use of proven
extraction practices, but that doesn’t mean one can be lackadaisical.
Ignoring extraction safety can lead to the laboratory literally
exploding, making you legally liable for staff injuries and potentially
dooming your professional cannabis career.
Here are five tips to help ensure that no security measure is forgotten.
1. Protect Staff
With
the focus on producing great extracts, it is often overlooked that the
most important aspect of laboratory safety is workers’ safety. For the
cannabis industry, specific hazards to consider are the extraction
solvent and cannabis material.
The explosion of butane laboratories is well publicized, and closed-loop BHO extractors mitigate the risk. Even CO2 poses dangers, as it can displace a room’s breathable oxygen. Therefore, ensure that CO2
levels stay below 3,000 ppm. As the extraction staff works with dried
milled material, protect them with particle masks, safety goggles and
coveralls.
2. Protect Instruments
Extraction instruments
are sophisticated machines that are the foundation of a company’s
success. They need to be well maintained, both to ensure their
uninterrupted use and their operational safety. Follow the
manufacturer’s advice regarding cleaning and maintenance. Focus on
valves, connections and seals that can wear out over time and start
leaking solvent and extract. Also, the pump is your economic engine,
make sure it does not slow down or break.
While these efforts
might be painstaking in the short term, keeping your machines running at
optimal performance is the more profitable, and safer, approach.
3. Protect Starting Material
As
the extraction process will extract and concentrate not only
cannabinoids and terpenes, but also contaminants like pesticides, it is
important to ensure the quality of the starting material. Conduct
regular quality control (QC) checks on received material. Whenever
pesticides make it into the extraction instrument, removing residues may
become a monumental effort.
Furthermore, the wrong storage
condition for the starting material can lead to cannabinoid degradation,
terpene loss and mold growth. Implement a just-in-time material supply
to reduce storage time.
4. Protect Product
Many factors
can influence extract quality. Check that your final product is within
the expected parameters on cannabinoid concentration to validate the
production process. Continue the regular QC checks to avoid missing any
unexpected pesticide contaminations.
It is often best to perform
internal QC tests so that you know the results of the final compliant
test beforehand, either by investing into your own testing instruments,
or collaborating with a third-party lab for R&D samples.
5. Plan and Follow Acronyms
Workers’
and production safety are not new. There have been well-practiced
standards across every other industry, and those structures can quickly
be adopted to address the current needs of the fledgling cannabis field.
Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) plans are a good
starting point to ensure the safety of every aspect in production. These
plans can eventually evolve to a full Current Good Manufacturing
Practice (cGMP) implementation.
Whatever protocols are adopted,
make sure they are written and adhered to. Even consider hiring a
dedicated QC person for your operation.
====================================
Everyone expects Meth labs to explode
regularly because the process of making Meth, while simple, is
inherently vulnerable to explosion because of the chemicals involved or
if, as often is the case, the operator is inexperienced, careless,
inattentive or stoned or, as also often happens, the equipment is poorly
made or the work location is poorly vented.
But for some reason, makers of Hash Oil
appear to think that they are working with a less dangerous process, or
that they have more leeway to be careless or stupid, which isn’t the
case – a fact testified to by dozens of hash oil facility explosions
every month, especially in states where Cannabis is now legal and so
there is a surplus of waste material that practically begs to be used.
Squeezing the last drop of goodness out of waste Cannabis leaf is an
almost irresistible temptation, and that is completely understandable.
While making hash oil safely on a large
scale is absolutely possible, given the right knowledge, equipment and
procedures, in this short blog I want to address the small-scale
grower/maker who is equally vulnerable to deadly explosion and fire
unless they are informed and careful, but who are much more often
working in a basement or garage where other people, often their own
children are present.
There are safe and effective ways to
extract the delightful properties of Cannabis from waste leaf left over
from trimming, and the internet if full of kitchen chemists and their
advice. I’m writing this blog to encourage these small-scale alchemists
to think twice before just googling “How To Make Hash Oil” and then
following the first advice that pops up on their screen.
Like the old coach says – there’s a
right way, and a wrong way to do things. Here then is a short set of
illustrations of what to watch for, illustrating the range of
good-to-bad advice available on the internet.
This excellent article offers safe
method for small-batch home extraction. It is detailed and the steps are
all well-illustrated, and the results should please anyone who is
willing to follow the directions.
Lengthy article that reviews a lot of
different methods and is full of cautionary notes that should be read
and clearly understood, but given the length and complexity of the piece
not everybody will come away knowing exactly how to make hash oil
safely.
This is a decent description of how to
use alcohol instead of butane to make small batches of hash oil. The
writer doesn’t seem to care much about the quality of the Cannabis being
used, but the steps to take are well-illustrated with photos and if you
follow the directions the method is safe. The key is evaporating the
alcohol without an open flame and the writer’s suggestion of a rice
cooker is a good one.
Here is an example of a well-meaning
writer giving advice that can cause serious injury or death. Although
the article has a lot of positives – it talks about using high quality
organic Cannabis and being selective about the strains you choose – your
first clue to the fact that the writer may not be totally safety
conscious is the first photo.
He is illustrating the point that you
need to work in a well-organized, clean space and the shot is of a very
nice kitchen – with a four-burner gas stove! Later on, he goes into
great detail about how to use a double boiler over high heat (on the
stove!) to evaporate the alcohol.
There’s only one thing to say about
this – alcohol fumes ignite, and they are ignited by open flames, and
they can ignite explosively. This article is an excellent example of why
you have to be careful where you get your advice!but
I hope that the following suggestion
isn’t too self-serving, if you want dozens of safe, effective, and
diverse Cannabis extraction methods explained in clear, step-by-step
fashion, I believe that my 1981 book “Marijuana Foods” is probably still
one of the best around. I covered dozens of natural, non-explosive
extraction methods for producing Cannabis extracts for cooking medibles,
and they are all safe and effective. In fact, even with all the recipes
floating around today, almost 40 years later, there’s not much that
wasn’t covered pretty thoroughly in this original book – the first of
its kind, incidentally.
