"Plant Extract International Business Standard" Released, Where Will the Plant Extract Industry Go?

China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Medicines and Health Products released a new edition of the“International Business Standards for Plant Extracts”. The release of this standard is conducive to regulating the export of plant extracts in China and improving international competitiveness. It also brings new opportunities and challenges to the plant extraction industry.

Plant extract refers to the use of plants as raw materials, according to the needs of the extracted final product, through the physical and chemical extraction and separation process, to obtain and concentrate one or more active ingredients in the plant without changing its effectiveness The composition of the product. According to the different components of the extracted plants, glycosides, acids, polyphenols, polysaccharides, terpenes, flavones, alkaloids, etc. are formed; according to different properties, they can be divided into vegetable oils, extracts, powders, and lenses.

At present, the export volume of plant extracts in China has been increasing year by year, accounting for half of China's exports of Chinese medicine products. However, since 2016, China's extract export growth has slowed down, and the industry has begun to adjust. According to authoritative statistics, the export value of plant extracts in China in 2016 was 1.93 billion US dollars, a year-on-year decrease of 10.93%, accounting for 56% of the export value of Chinese medicines. And into 2017, the downward trend continues.

Part of the decline is due to the huge export volume of plant extracts in China, which has made the United States and other countries stricter and stricter on the quality of plant extracts. For example, the European Union Directive lists 29 pesticide residue measurement categories, and there are more than 300 pesticide residue restrictions on products related to plant extracts. At present, the plant extraction industry is restricted by the lack of industry standards, and there are problems such as relatively chaotic production, low industrial concentration, and inability to distinguish between good and bad.

In addition, China's export value of plant extracts is low, backward purification technology and low quality of export products are also a major reason for the decline in export volume. Of the active ingredients extracted from natural plants, most are active and heat-sensitive substances. Traditional processes can easily degrade or inactivate the extracted active substances, resulting in a large loss of nutritional components of the product. At the same time, the extract contains a large amount of impurities that cannot be effectively removed by traditional filtration such as vegetable protein and tannin. The presence of these impurities often makes the extract in a suspended state, which will affect the storage stability and product quality of the extract. Traditional centrifugation, clarifier, alcohol precipitation, and macroporous resin adsorption methods cannot maximize the clarification and filtration of plant extracts, and they have high energy consumption.

The plant extract industry is developing rapidly as a sunrise industry, and the market competition is also very fierce. Especially today, Japan and South Korea and other Asian neighboring countries have become increasingly popular in plant extraction industries. This passive situation of exports is even more difficult to reverse. Therefore, accelerating the transformation and upgrading of the plant extraction industry, improving China's purification technology, increasing the performance of research and development of extraction equipment, and improving the export quality of plant extracts are major keys.

As the leader of concentration and separation technology, Delammel uses membrane integration technology to improve the existing plant extraction concentration process. Since the membrane separation process is a pure physical process, it has the characteristics of no phase change, energy saving, small size, and detachability. For organic compounds of different compositions, different membranes can be selected according to the molecular weight of the organic matter, and a suitable membrane process is selected. So as to achieve the best membrane flux and rejection rate, thereby improving production yield, reducing investment scale and operating costs. The application of membrane separation technology in the purification and concentration of plant extracts optimizes the process of plant extraction, shortens the production cycle, increases the content of effective ingredients, saves a lot of solvent consumption, and helps China's plant extraction industry break barriers To enhance the export space.