Fiber-type Cannabis sativa L.: Innovative extraction methods for the analysis of the non-volatile fraction

Environmental sustainability is currently a topic of global interest and regulatory organizations are developing policies to encourage the reduction of waste and pollution, and the efficient use of resources. In this sense, the valorization of plants as natural and eco-compatible resources and as reservoirs of bioactive compounds has become increasingly important for many applications, including pharmaceutical, cosmetic, functional food and food supplement industries. To avoid depleting endangered species and natural resources, multifunctional crops should be exploited at industrial scale. Fiber-type Cannabis sativa L. perfectly fits this purpose because it is widely distributed all over the world and can grow under versatile conditions. The interest for fiber-type hemp in the health field has gained much attention over the last years, being a source of a wide variety of specialized metabolites, that mainly belong to cannabinoids, phenols and terpenes chemical classes. Several analytical methods have been proposed for the detection, identification, and quantification of phytochemicals from C. sativa plant. Due to the complexity of plant matrices, sample preparation is necessary to make the sample compatible with downstream analysis. The pre-treatment steps have a significant impact on the sustainability of the overall analysis process as they often require the use of disposable materials, energy-consuming equipment and instrumentation, and extraction methods that employ harmful solvents. The increasing demand for innovative technologies, energy saving, and greener solvents makes necessary the development of new extraction methods to obtain the metabolites of interest from natural resources. In this regard, this study aims to present different lab-scale approaches for the extraction and enrichment of the non-volatile fraction of different hemp-related products (aerial parts, inflorescences, cannabidiol CBD oil). Innovative materials were tested as extraction phases in microextraction techniques and compared in terms of sustainability and analytical performances.