UK chemical company, Ineos, run by the billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe is planning two new hand sanitizer factories. It says it should have them build within ten days to help prevent coronavirus from spreading ASAP. The firm – which is the UK’s biggest private company by sales – is now in talks with the National Health Services (NHS) on supplying the products to medical facilities for free.
Once the plants are operational, they should be able to produce a million bottles of hand sanitizer a month. One of the factories will be located at an existing Ineos site near Middlesbrough (at Newton Aycliffe), and the other will be in Germany. The company started planning for the factories last week after receiving fast-tracked regulatory approvals and has already increased alcohol production, according to company director Tom Crotty.
Ineos already produces two of the critical ingredients of hand sanitizer – ethanol and isopropyl alcohol – at its factories in Scotland, Grangemouth, and Germany. The company is Europe’s largest producer of these ingredients. However, with high demands for hand sanitizer plaguing the entire world now, Ineos realized that the producers of the gel are all running at full tilt and there isn’t enough of it to go around.
Crotty said:
We figured that we’d already pushed as much of our product as possible into these uses but there’s a limit on the capacity to produce the gel. Switching the lines would cost about £2m in the short term, but the company has not yet assessed the potential size of the longer-term market, given the urgent need.
Every nation’s manufacturing sector has been struggling to adjust to the abnormal needs brought by the coronavirus pandemic. Other companies have also pledged to use their factories to help make hand sanitizer. For example, France’s LVMH (owner of brands such as Moët & Chandon, Hennessy, and Louis Vuitton) promised to switch over its perfume factories. And, the independent brewer BrewDog has already been making hand sanitizer from its distillery in Aberdeenshire. It recently made its first deliveries of free bottles to the NHS’s Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.
