From finger hash to 99.9 percent pure isolates — that's a pretty significant technological leap in only a few short decades. Cannabis is experiencing an unprecedented technological revolution created by a confluence of legalization, scientific attention, and public demand.
The extraction side of the industry is a primary example of this technological leap forward. As cannabis moves away from crude extractions and into pharmaceutical-grade production, it demands cleaner, more efficient, and more affordable extraction techniques and equipment.
To highlight the dramatic shift in extractions over the last few decades, it's worth reviewing the history of cannabis concentrates. From kief collection to Sixth Wave Affinity MIPs technology, extractions are not what they used to be.
A Brief History of Concentrates
Concentrates are not just a 21st-century fad. Crude cannabis extracts have a long cultural history along the cannabis trade routes, from the Himalayas to the Middle East.
Historically, cannabis-producing cultures have concentrated the plants' medicinal value using labor-intensive and solventless techniques. Hash, kief, and char are some primary examples of hand-collected and culturally significant concentrates. Made by rubbing flowers and plant material by hand, then compressing the oily trichomes together into a brick or ball, these were the original concentrates.
Hash and char have given way to more advanced solventless extraction technologies in the last few decades. With a need for less labor-intensive and higher outputs, bubble hash, and most recently, rosin concentrates have come into the market. Neither improved on potency, but they did make commercial production faster and more viable.
The Rise of Solvent-Based Extractions
The introduction of solvents into the extraction process improved outputs, efficiency, and potency. At the beginning of solvent-based solutions (and before cannabis was legal), extraction technology was notoriously dangerous and highly explosive. Crude solvent extractions, using dirty hydrocarbons and homemade equipment in backyard black market operations, often made
headlines as these clandestine labs exploded.
In this phase, extraction meant using solvents like butane and propane to wash trichomes from cured flower, and then the hydrocarbons were boiled off to produce a sticky, highly potent concentrate. These rudimental extractors used jerry-rigged equipment in unventilated spaces, creating extremely unsafe working environments.
As the legal industry evolved, the solvent-based extractions quickly adopted technologies from the food, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries. Extractions moved from backyards into specially built labs. Ethanol, butane, propane, and CO2 are the most common solvent extractions today.
The basic premise of the process remained the same, using solvents to pull trichomes from organic material. But, the technology has drastically improved, risks mitigated, and the final product is cleaner and more potent. Today, extractors use closed-loop systems where the hydrocarbons are never exposed to open air, and all producers fall under strict regulations and safety protocols.
CO2 is another popular solvent. It also follows the same basic hydrocarbon method of washing flower with CO2 within a closed-loop system. A primary difference with CO2 is that both high pressure and cold temperatures are necessary. CO2 systems are generally more expensive and technical to create and run.
Concentrates produced from solvents vary in color and consistency, depending on many influences. The most common final products include shatters, budders, waxes, and sugars.
More Refined: Distillations and Isolates
Although highly potent, solvent cannabis extractions still contain a significant percentage of plant materials, including waxes, fats, flavonoids, and other undesirable compounds.
Short path distillation is one popular approach to refining these extractions one step further to produce a distillate. Distillation is a significant step towards refining extractions down to a 90–95 percent pure substance.
Short path distillation is a closed system with three main components: a hot bath, a cold column, and a vacuum. Producers use a temperature-controlled hot bath to evaporate cannabinoids from the crude cannabis extraction, and these cannabinoids then collect within the cold chamber. The entire system operates in a vacuum to reduce evaporation and product loss into the air.
Isolates are the next step towards 100 percent pure cannabinoid concentrate. As a nearly perfectly pure and uncomplicated compound, isolates are in high demand among edible producers and within the pharmaceutical industry.
Although in high demand, the current isolate technology is limited at best. Chromatography, adapted by the cannabis industry from the chemical and pharmaceutical sectors, is slow, astronomically expensive, and has extremely low outputs.
A New Way Forward: Affinity Beads
The extractions industry is a perfect example of the theory of accelerating change: the perceived increasing rate of technological advancement over time. Cannabis concentrates stayed crude and consistent for millennia, but over the last twenty years, they have skyrocketed into pharmaceutical-grade quality and purity.
Yet, even short path distillation and chromatography are not perfect solutions. Throughputs within these systems are low, capital investments are high, and the combination often puts these technologies out of reach for the majority of cannabis producers.
New technology could solve the output and investment dilemma posed by these legacy technologies. Sixth Wave's Affinity Production Unit adopts Molecular Imprinted Polymer (MIP) technology for cannabinoid extraction.
The Affinity Production Unit mitigates the risk of solvent extractions by working within a closed system with ambient temperatures. It works entirely off their patented Affinity Beads (MIPs) technology or MIPs. Imprinted with targeted cannabinoids (THC, CBD, or others), these beads capture the individual cannabinoids during the solvent wash and nothing else. Furthermore, the system uses ethanol instead of hydrocarbons, putting some of the lingering consumer concerns about contamination to rest.
Affinity Production a Prime Example of Acceleration Change
Unlike short path distillation and chromatography, Affinity solution requires shorter production time, has negligible product loss compared to conventional technologies — and all for a substantially lower capital and operational expenditure. Sixth Wave has also created this system with unlimited scalability, meaning no problems with throughput.
If cannabis extraction technology is an example of accelerating change theory, Affinity Beads and the Sixth Wave Production Unit are the next evolution in extractions—building off technologies pulled from other industries, but solving several of the most notable issues all in one shot.