Advice for material that failed for heavy metals?

Hash and Stuff Extraction
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We have biomass that failed for heavy metals on our state.

So far I haven’t found a lab that would take it or be able to do anything for us. Are heavy metals retained in kief/hash? That’s one other option. Thanks for any advice

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Heavy metals are frequently either not possible or not economically viable to remediate.

It’s probable that you’re going to have a hard time moving that biomass to anyone who is in the legal market and/or gives a shit about their users.

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maybe someone thats making distillate and doesnt mind doing some chromatography will take it off your hands

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I had seen some claims that they don’t pass through in kief or hash and also that there were different methods for filtering them out. But I was ultimately worried it was an entire loss

5

so kief and send in for testing…

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I believe magsil-pr may grab some.

It is my understanding that the heavy metals are in everything, including the trichomes.

But I’ve never had to deal with the nasties myself, so I am not speaking from experience.

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What State??

Curious as to what you think the source might be

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I’ve seen quite a few labs remediating heavy metals from isolates with a centrifuge.

I’ve heard that passing an extract diluted in hydrocarbons over alumina can have some positive results

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Yes they are. We had a bunch of “organic” growers here mad that they failed for heavy metals. They were using azomite, kelp and cheap Leonardite, all known for high heavy metals as inputs.

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10

You can do a trial extraction run using CRC and have it tested after. Here is a cut and paste from a media manufacturer responding to a question I had about remediating metals:

"In this case, depth filtration will be your friend so although the right media does help you are mostly going to be looking for a good deep filter stack that can effectively trap those heavy metals in so even a simplistic stack of some b80 and alumina would do the trick to a degree again depending on how contaminated the biomass is. "

We have had biomass that passed for metals, but was right at the actionable limit, come out with a non detect using CRC in the past.

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I had a processor here in michigan take some live resin that failed for nickel and they distilled it. The result was an ultra clean distillate

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Extract it and distill it. Depending on what the heavy metal is, it may not be volatile, and will end up in the residue fraction.
Otherwise toss it. It’s a headache and not worth the trouble

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Toss the whole crop? Haha. Not great news but maybe the only choice.

State is NY, failed for nickel by .02%

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14

Try doing nothing and retesting. That is a super low %.

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I know magsil was mentioned but if you could find a robust ion exchanger resin that can deal with cannabis resin and your solvent systems you could probably grab a few of the problematic species.

I had a homie that used to use ion exchangers to clean water at fukishima of heavy metals and nuclides (sp?) (obviously that gig isnt around anymore)

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Are you solvent processing this? An LLE some pH 2 washes should pull enough out of the organic layer. I normally don’t even really do this, but I’ve found an LLE gets me below the LOQ. Perhaps I’m wrong though.

Ion exchange resin is likely a more sure-fire route to take if you want to get it out.

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Have a look into ion-exchange resins with chelating thiourea or iminodiacetic acid groups
They are designed for the selective removal of several heavy metals (including nickel)

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18

Learn to use dcm or similar solvent with magsil. Works great.

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DCM over an alkane solution? I’m curious to your reasoning.

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You can use heptane and hexane and pentane as well.