Why Ethanol Works So Well for Cannabis Extraction

That said, butane is highly combustible, and incompetent home butane extractors have been responsible for the manifold stories of explosions resulting in serious injuries and giving cannabis extraction as a whole a bad rap. Furthermore, low-quality butane utilized by unscrupulous extractors can retain an array of toxins that are harmful to humans.

Supercritical CO2, for its part, has been praised for its relative safety in terms of toxicity as well as environmental impact. That said, the lengthy purification process required to remove co-extracted constituents, such as waxes and plant fats, from the extracted product can take away from the final cannabinoid and terpenoid profile of extracts yielded during supercritical CO2 extraction.

Ethanol turned out to be just that: effective, efficient, and safe to handle. The FDA classifies ethanol as “Generally Regarded as Safe,” or GRAS, meaning that it is safe for human consumption. As a result, it is commonly used as a food preservative and additive, found in everything from the cream filling in your donut to the glass of wine you enjoy after work.

Even though ethanol is safer than butane and more effective than supercritical CO2, a standard ethanol extraction isn’t without its issues. The biggest hurdle by far was ethanol’s polarity, a polar solvent [such as ethanol] will readily mix with water and dissolve water soluble molecules. Chlorophyll is one of those compounds which will easily co-extract when using ethanol as a solvent.

Cryogenic ethanol extraction way is able to reduce the chlorophyll and the lipids after extraction. But for the long extraction time, low production efficiency, and high power consumption, which make the ethanol extraction can’t show its advantages.

While traditional filtration way do not work well especially in the commercial production, the chlorophyll and the lipids will cause coking in the Short Path Distillation Machine and waste your valuable production time instead of cleaning.

Through research and experimentation over the span of several months, Gioglass Technology Department was able to conceive a method that purify both the chlorophyll and the lipids in botanical materials after extraction. This proprietary function allows for the creation of Room Temperature ethanol extraction. That will sharply decrease the production cost in cannabinoid production.

At present, this exclusive process is applied in USA. & Zimbabwe CBD/THC production line.