Does your facility produce concentrates? With state, country, and local rules, it is imperative to stay up to date with safety and compliance as you extract cannabis. The chemicals and equipment involved need to be handled with mindfulness.
Communication and education will help people stay safe and it will help keep moving the industry in the right direction.
Marijuana Times has an article with good tips about safety and compliance.
Compliance Rules in Cannabis Extractions: Keeping up with Change By MJT Story Team
Just when you thought you had a handle on the compliance rules regarding equipment and operating practices involved in extractions, the powers that be change them again. This is a common complaint within the commercial cannabis industry these days. As in other areas of business – and life, for that matter – the lowest common denominator ends up changing the rules for the rest of us. Someone carelessly operating a home extraction set-up blows up a garage or burns down a business because of unsafe and/or uneducated practices, and you can bet the rules will change for everyone, at every level.
Staying compliant isn’t easy with the changing legislation and rules. Every state, county, and city is different. Every legislative body has their own lawyers, engineers, and advisors – because to them, they’re in mostly undiscovered territory. And this pattern will continue with each new state that legalizes some form of cannabis. Overshadowing all of these legislatures is the federal government that still classifies cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug, making it illegal in their eyes, so each local governing authority has to dot every “i” and cross every “t” to avoid drawing further attention to their state or community. Extractions are increasingly under the microscope with the new direction the laws are headed. If it is flammable, it needs to be in a Class 1 Division 1 environment. This new ruling is encompassing a lot more extraction types than it has in the past; it now includes ethanol, alcohol, and other flammable gases.
Denver, Colorado was “ground zero” for the legalization and regulation of this budding (pun intended) industry. Colorado has, through trial and error, developed relationships with legislators through communication and education, along with self-policing and developing strict standards within the local commercial cannabis industry, and we continue to develop new practices and safer standards for growing and extraction methods. Because of the groundwork laid and the success Colorado has seen throughout its evolution in the cannabis industry, we are being studied – and copied – as a template for other states as they gradually legalize cannabis with each election cycle. The state of Colorado, and other counties, tend to follow the rules that Denver creates, and in turn, the other states, cities, and counties follow suit and establish similar rules.