Oil Extraction Methods
Traditional Oil Extraction
All of our products are produced using traditional, chemical free methods. Traditional extraction of oils has many benefits. Traditional methods are environmentally sustainable and help to preserve local knowledge and cultures. Furthermore, the oils produced contain their full moisturizing, healing and protective properties.
Hexane Extraction
However, the most common method for producing oils is through hexane extraction. This is especially true in the industrialized nations, but is becoming more common in the “less developed” nations as well. The following information on hexane extraction of oils has been paraphrased from the Producers’ Natural Processing Inc website (pnpi.com).
Hexane is the dominate extraction solvent for oil seeds throughout the world. Hexane is cheap and abundant, as it is a petroleum product and is produced during the production of gasoline. The combination of extremely large availability, very low cost, and simple effectiveness have led to hexane’s popularity. However, this has come at a cost to the consumers and the environment.
Hexane has been categorized as a hazardous air pollutant (HAP) by the US Environmental Protection Agency, and is included on the agency’s list of toxic chemicals (Inform, Vol. 9, No.7, July 1998:p 708.) By inherent design, even the newest oil processing facilities lose hexane into the environment. It has been estimated that an average sized soybean facility loses 6,000 pounds of hexane per day to the environment through atmospheric leaks. At this rate, an average oil producing facility would release one tanker truck (40,000 pounds) of hexane into the environment every week.
In addition, some residual hexane remains in the oil and meal (residues remaining from extraction that are used as animal feeds). Hexane residues can run as high as 0.5% in meal, high enough to kill baby piglets. Hexane forms an extremely strong bond with certain protein. Therefore, hexane released during digestion is free to bond with proteins and other hydrophobic molecules in the body, a phenomenon supported by over 30 years of research. A scientific study of six hexane-extracted cooking oils found higher than expected levels of pentane, hexane, heptane, octane and benzene derivatives in all the oils. This means that humans and livestock may be ingesting greater amounts of petroleum derivatives than previously thought through hexane-extracted oils and meal.
Hexane is a very efficient oil extractor, and extracted up to 5% of unsaponifiable materials. This means the resulting oils contain these "unwanted" materials, which then need to be removed to get odorless, colorless oil that pleases the public. The refinement process includes thermal processing and chemical additions, mainly sodium hydroxide and results in toxic waste sludge and greatly degraded unsaponifiables. Furthermore, the meal no longer contains the oil-soluble nutrients and is of much lower quality for animal feed.
Finally, hexane is a high-vapor-pressure gasoline, which is being endlessly redistilled in a closed loop, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. As a result, it is very volatile, flammable and explosive. Hexane is a simple physical hazard and many plants have exploded and burned over the past 50 years.
There are options to hexane extracting, including mechanical presses and traditional extraction procedures. However, hexane continues to be the major extraction method, and new hexane oil processing plants continue to be constructed. This is especially troubling in lower income countries, where these plants replace traditional extraction methods at a high environmental, social and economical cost.
chemical free.
