"My name is Benedikt and I need your booze now" With this appeal, spirits producer Benedikt Brauers asked for private donations of alcohol to make disinfectant. And he is not alone in this, since the start of the corona pandemic, disinfectants have been in short supply and the demand for pure alcohol to make them has also risen sharply. Christoph Berg, managing director of F.O. Licht, an analyst firm specializing in the ethanol industry, estimates that the demand for pure alcohol has increased significantly. Licht, estimates the additional demand for pure alcohol for disinfectant production in Europe at 20 million liters per month.

Wanderer Distillery

Normally Benedikt Brauer produces finest gin of the brand wanderer destillerie

in his distillery, but during the Corona crisis he converted his distillery into a non-profit company for the production of disinfectants. This is done in cooperation with a pharmacy, because when the production started in March 2020 only pharmacies had the special permission to produce disinfectants.
Photo: © Wanderer Distillery, 2020

In order to make production as efficient as possible and to be able to produce large quantities of disinfectant, the business is asking for alcohol donations from residents, as this will allow it to produce around 1000 bottles of disinfectant. The disinfectants are delivered primarily to doctors' offices and nursing homes, "where it is needed most," Brauer said.

And needed it is in many places right now. So even big companies like Beiersdorf, Alpirsbacher Klosterbräu and Jägermeister

decided to get in on the production. Beiersdorf already announced in mid-March that it would provide 500 tons of hand disinfectant for hospitals, staff and public facilities. And Wanderer's pivot has also paid off - the startup has now been able to produce several hundred liters of disinfectant (as of 20.04).

Alpirsbacher monastery brew

The well-known brewery Alpirsbacher Klosterbräu also provides 8000 litres of the purifying liquid. The agent is obtained from excess ethanol that is left over from brewing non-alcoholic beer.

UVIS UV-Innovative Solutions

However, besides medium-sized startups and large corporations that dare to change their product range, there are also startups whose business purposes are completely focused on disinfection.

For example, uvis

, the Cologne-based startup has developed a disinfection module for escalator handrails that uses UVC rays to make them germ-free in seconds.

The idea for the product came to the founders back in the days of swine flu in 2010, when Tanja Zirnstein (nickel) and Katharina Obladen took part in a school competition and thought about how to effectively combat pathogens in public spaces. "Electricity is available at every escalator and we were familiar with the use of UV light to reduce germs from the food industry - so why not use the same principle for escalator handrails," explains Katharina Obladen. So it came about that the two patented their product ESCALITE

while still at school.

After finishing their studies in 2016, they founded uvis UV innovations and became the first funding recipients of the newly launched NRW.SeedCap

, which provides young companies, especially from the digital economy, with their first funding.How effective the disinfection technology is against the Covid-19 virus, however, cannot be said at the moment. Nevertheless, the idea is very innovative and an example of original developments in spite of or precisely because of a crisis.

That was part #2 of our series "Pivot Masters."

Next week, we'll turn our attention to the topic of "ventilators" in part three.

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