Turning stale booze into market-ready hand sanitizer

Tucked away off a side street in Hamilton's industrial sector, a niche distillation and liquid destruction plant has quietly produced around 4,000 litres of federally approved hand sanitizer a day - all from stale and unusable booze.

Canadian Liquid Processors Ltd., a division of the Emterra Group, has shipped thousands of bottles of locally made sanitizer to customers across the country amid the coronavirus crisis.

The 24-hour plant sees about 10 tractor-trailers - each spanning some 50 feet and filled to the brim with rejected containers of beer and liquor - roll past its gated fences on Biggar Avenue on any given day.

There, a group of more than four-dozen workers process the reclaimed beverages to produce around 2,000 half-litre bottles of sanitizer per trailer that meet the World Health Organization's standard for effective antibacterial disinfectant.

The spectrum (of customers) that we're helping support is very wide," said Sean O'Neill, the plant's general manager, noting that their sanitizer has been sent to as far as an in-need fire department in rural British Columbia.

Once we got going, the phones started ringing and didn't stop ... It's been an amazing and very rewarding experience."

O'Neill's plant offers confidential destruction of consumer products and liquids. The ethanol they extract from reclaimed beverages is generally sold to industrial manufacturers who make products like windshield wiper fluid and RV antifreeze.

When the market dried up at the outset of the pandemic, O'Neill got thinking.

One of the plant owners kind of poked me and asked, Can we turn our ethanol into hand sanitizer?'" he said.

I stated searching the internet and what we could make, and I came up with a few formulas."

Using a three-column still, as they always do, the plant processes unsuitable booze to an ethanol product that boasts a 96.5 per cent purity rate. They then break it down with the ingredients required to make sanitizer - water, glycerine, hydrogen peroxide - and churn out a market-ready solution with an 80 per cent ethyl alcohol concentration.

O'Neill said the sanitizer was initially intended to supply Emterra's 1,200 employees. Eventually, though, word got out in the community - the plant first donated a batch to Hamilton's paramedic unit - and the side project of sorts took off.

It's really challenging to move anything across the country right now. We haven't had to change our core business (model), we've just had to reinvent our end product," O'Neill said.

Part of that change comes with the packaging and distribution of products. O'Neill said the plant has partnered with bottle suppliers in Toronto and Hamilton to get the hand sanitizer to those that need it most. And it's a given a boost to local businesses in the process.

Crescent Oil, a lubricant supplier in operation since 1905 on Cannon Street, saw its sales crunch once customers in the auto and farming industry rolled back their production and demand. The company then shifted gears to outsourcing personal protective equipment, a change which owner Dash Ewen said was largely begot of a feeling to still serve the community and essential workers.

Masks and face shields were scarce, but sanitizer even more so, Ewen said. When a Crescent Oil driver dropped off lubricants to process at O'Neill's plant and was offered a bottle of sanitizer, Ewen said it seemed a no-brainer to chip in with the cause.

We're well setup to deliver in cases, jugs and pails since we normally deliver heavy containers of oil," he said. So we've been able to get the sanitizer out to the people of Hamilton in smaller qualities."

For O'Neill, besides offering a product that's experiencing critical shortages to the community, what's been most rewarding is seeing it shipped to front-line workers in dire demand.

We've been able to get it into the hands of EMS, fire departments, homeless shelters, and the feedback from people has just been incredible," he said.

It really is a positive thing that we can turn something that may have impacted our environment negatively into something that's very positive in these challenging times."

Sebastian Bron is a Hamilton-based reporter at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sbron@thespec.com