Bifenthrin remediation in butane extraction

Had a bunch of live resin fail after purchasing a system second hand for Bifenthrin and just curious what people thought for remediation by re diluting in butane and then filtering through .2 micron filter and some media? Any input is greatly appreciated.

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some benonite and activated carbon should assist with this. bifenthrin doesn’t like to attach the same way as some other pesticides…

but honestly - bifenthrin is pretty nasty. so depending on the level of contamination - you might consider cutting your losses and not doing anything. wouldn’t want a customer to have a negative experience? and too much bifenthrin can kill people, especially when ingested orally or inhaled.

did you not clean your second hand system? water soap, ethanol rinses, etc.? its really water soluble, so if you had to you could have cleaned it off. I only ask cause - are you sure its not the starting material, cause if it is and you still have some, you don’t want to cross contaminate any other batches. <3

And if you wanted you could probably do a LLE with it… I don’t know how many times you would have to do so to get a passing result. Bifenthrin is super hard to get out cause of all its halogen electrons.

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That’s my problem the flower passed testing idk if the levels were super low on flower and then I concentrated it but I definitely did ethanol wash everything. I will add distilled water to my wash routine as I have noticed a the stupidity in not eliminating water soluble contaminates. I definitely can’t afford to cut my losses unfortunately and need to find a way to remediate this effectively. Deferring to Distillate would definitely probably have me lose my job. Would all of my butane likely be contaminated now? I saw the levels lowering between the first processing and the last strain processed. I will be doing a full tear down soak and clean again. Just curious if I filter my butane through carbon and bentonite clay would even be worth it? Thank you for responding @Cassin !!

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This is exactly what happened, distilling can concentrate it even further. Unfortunately if I recall correctly it acts like THC and passes through clays and adsorbents at similar rates. If you have access to a real flash system with UV traces and fractionation I’d honestly say that’s your only bet.

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I’ve not found a viable solution as of yet. It is a nasty horrible chemical that we should work to ban the use of

Kansas is covered in it

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I feel that - only thing I’ve seen work 100% is LLE with water, where you are stripping it into the water and removing it from the water with activated carbon. Even then it only gets like 60-70% of the contamination. :frowning: You can always try but man, its nasty nasty.

Yes - your solvent and any media would be contaminated… it will keep diluting into other things (little bits at a time) but you’re contaminated and everything after you ran the contaminated material is also contaminated.

:frowning:

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I’m currently in Montana system was purchased from Southern California but was cleaned extensively as I would before setting up any closed loop for the first time. My concern now is the system and butane contaminated and needing to be cleaned. Is the butane contaminated to a point I should just waste it. I’m shocked I’ve never run into this pesticide before and it seems to be so common lol I feel very newbish.

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I would cut the losses on the butane and any media/filters. Then do a full water, including soap/water, followed by solvent for cleaning. And then - I’d do a rinse test, but I’m paranoid about contamination.

Rinse test is where you run distilled water through - and collect a sample for submission. Then you do the same thing with ethanol. You could do it with oil…i’ve seen people do that as well, but then you gotta really clean it again.

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It doesn’t distill back into the butane, it stays in the material, specifically in the terp layer. Clean the whole system with soap & water, then Ethanol, then run clean material with that butane, and it will pass with no residuals, unless the contamination is your location, like that stuff got sprayed there at anytime within the last 7 years, and if that’s the case, good luck my friend.

Get it to a passable level by crystalizing, what you do from there could be some of the above mentioned lle recommendations.

to do this you need a reactor and a sub mic filter/CRC
dilute your extact in 9 parts N pentane
add to reactor and begin stirring at half speed (60-80)
pour 1 gallon of pure distilled water for every 20L of miscella
turn speed up to high (120-160)
wash for 30 min
turn of rotation and let settle for 10 min
drain water layer from reactor
repeat wash cycle 2 more time
after final separation run miscella over small bed of AA and DE to absorb residual waters
dry in rotovap
pour crude into collection base re-dilute with butane and then continue with post possessing as normal

*Do not use this process if you’re trying to clean dirty disty, only use with thca crude/bho it will convert your D9, but perfectly fine to take the crude/BHO to disty after washing

*This process will slightly oxidize your extract so strongly suggest running through small CRC stack after it’s been re-diluted in butane

*The water coming from the wash will be very toxic make sure you properly dispose of and use the proper ppe while working with it

:+1:

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Water wash will concentrate bifenthrin, a water wash 100% will not do anything

Solubility in water: <0.1 ppb

O’Neil, M.J. (ed.). The Merck Index - An Encyclopedia of Chemicals, Drugs, and Biologicals. Cambridge, UK: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2013., p. 213

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Damn brother sorry you gotta deal with this but hopefully it’ll get sorted out!

I’ve had some disty pop hot for bifenthrin once. I extract with cold etOH (or at least at that time), defat, and hot c-scrub. Sent out for testing, popped hot, rescrubbed the disty sent back out and all good from there. ND on the COA

Whatever works let us know and hope the best for you! :saluting_face:

its soluble at 0.1mg per Liter or .3745mg per gal
( source EXTOXNET PIP aka Extension toxicology network pesticide information profiles)
so a 60 liter wash would remove 3.37ppms and you can easily double your water per wash and pull 6.74ppm you could also double the amount of washes and pull 13.48ppms
I’ve done it plenty of times to hemp and canna crude :man_shrugging: now if you have crazy levels of contamination I would imagine it is less efficient but for basic or small levels this is just fine

@TheWillBilly Do you have before and after testing to show that this is effective? In principle it shouldn’t work. Just because bifenthrin is soluble in water at some low level does not mean it will partition from the pentane. Bifenthrin is much ’more soluble in pentane. I don’t see why it would move to the water.

Very cool if true. I wonder if the bifenthrin reacts with the water somehow

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@Photon_noir likely has both a solution and the product to do it!

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Yeah I do, I’ll pull some up and post it later this afternoon when I’m done in the lab (remind me if I forget), I think the other polar compunds that’s are being separated into the water are most likely aiding the situation, but I dont know exactly whats causing it just that the remediation process has been very successful for cleaning up almost all pesticides

I could also see it having something todo with left over acids/base from using media powder

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You sure you’re not misremembering it as bifenazate? I have coas showing concentration, even with a citric acid step involved in the wash.

There are ways to knock it down but not my ballgame anymore.

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I’m pretty sure it was bifenthrin, but I’ll double check when I go look at the COAs to make sure

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Bump! Just reminding you, @TheWillBilly ! :wink:

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@Goose , I recommend you listen to the folks saying to thoroughly clean your system! I recommend Alconox products for deep cleaning… and include some sodium metasilicate in your wash water for pesticide removal!

If you need to remediate the product BHO, you might just try dissolving product in wet alcohol and filtering it through activated charcoal. The proper method “would definitely probably” depend on the levels and types of contamination in your product. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
What is the tested concentration of bifenthrin in your product?

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