A cannabis education group has teamed up with a cannabis testing lab in BC to look into the impacts of remediation on cannabis. 

Francis Hall and Tom Rothmeier, the team behind Urbanistic, a cannabis education and quality grading company based in BC, recently launched a study looking into how cannabis is affected by the e-beam remediation process, not just immediately after remediation but also several months later. 

While there have been studies done on the effects of irradiation on cannabis, those results were only looking at the immediate impacts, not long term, says Hall. He and his partner Rothmeier wanted to better understand how that process can change cannabis after it’s sat on shelves. 

Hall says the idea is one he has been looking at for a while, and it finally came together once they found the right partners, with both a local producer providing cannabis samples and a local lab to test those samples.

The unnamed producer is providing two 160-gram samples from the same lot/batch, one that will go through a standard e-beam remediation process and one that will not. Those samples will then be shared with analytical cannabis testing lab Northern Scientific, also in BC, which will test them for things like cannabinoid and terpene levels, as well as microbes like mould and mildew.

Those samples will be tested right after the e-beam remediation process, done at a facility in BC, and again after three, six, and, ideally, nine months. This will give a better real-world look at how the e-beam process impacts both product quality and shelf stability for microbials. 

“It just struck me that a big thing we’re missing is we’re not reflecting the average supply chain that a product actually goes through until it reaches the consumer,” he explains. “So that was more the point that I was coming from. Is this research fit for purpose and an accurate representation of how a product typically gets remediated and moves through the supply chain?”

Zack Paul, the CEO and founder of Northern Scientific, Inc., located in Langley, BC, says he was eager to participate in the research when approached by Urbanistic. Not only is he interested to see the long-term effects of remediation on cannabinoids and terpenes, but also the long-term implications of the effect of microbials on shelf-life stability.

This is important not only for cannabis sold in Canada—which might wait weeks or months from harvest to being sent to a distributor, then to a store, before a consumer buys it—but also for cannabis sold on the international market. These products, he says, can often take an even longer and more circuitous route to consumers, making it especially important to ensure the remediation process helps hold back unwanted microbial growth not just immediately after but several months later. 

“We’re very happy to be on board, and it’s fascinating, the information we’re going to see at the end of this,” says Paul. “It’s valuable research that we just don’t have.”

“No one really does testing post-e-beam or irradiation for potency or terpenoids, so to be able to see what degradation, analytically, we can find is going to be fascinating. 

“As well, with microbiology, we know that with irritation or e-beam, it more or less stunts or puts those microbes dormant. It doesn’t kill them completely. So you will start to see regrowth, it’s just a matter of when.”

Urbanistic is hosting a GoFundMe campaign to help raise $15,000 to pay for the research. Although the page refers to research on irradiation, Hall reiterates that the research is specifically on the e-beam process, which differs somewhat from the irradiation process. Both are used by cannabis companies in Canada for the purpose of remediating their crops for shelf stability, although e-beam has become the more commonly used process in recent years.  

Acknowledging this important distinction, Hall says he chose the term “irradiation” because it’s the most commonly understood term among consumers.

In addition to lab testing, Urbanistic will also apply their own in-house grading system to the product, which includes blind sensory examination as well as product sampling to see if there are any noticeable effects of the e-beam process, either visually, from the aroma, or taste or even overall effect and experience. 

I think that will complement the lab testing really well,” says Hall. “I think it’s going to give us an understanding of how the remediation has changed everything from the curing and freshness of the plant to the colours of the plant, the robustness of the trichome heads, the colour of the trichome heads, all the way through to the actual consumption of the product.”

You can learn more about the project here.

What is remediation? 

In the simplest sense, irradiation works by exposing harvested cannabis to radiation—commonly either gamma, electron-beam (e-beam), or x-ray—to render contaminants like mould spores and other microbes inert and harmless to the consumer. 

At the outset of legalization, gamma irradiation was the most common method of decontamination, but since then, some producers have moved to e-beam remediation, a shorter and cheaper process than gamma that produces comparable results. Irradiation is a general term for when radiation interacts with an object, while e-beam irradiation is a specific type of irradiation that uses high-energy electrons to sterilize products.

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