A new chemicals plant that aims to make millions of bottles of hand sanitiser could be operational by the end of the week.
Ineos – which is led by Britain's richest man, Sir Jim Ratcliffe - is building the plant at its existing site in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, having decided only a week ago to join the national effort against coronavirus.
Speaking to the BBC's Today programme, Ineos director Tom Crotty said that the company had felt the need to step up because of its size and capabilities in chemical manufacturing.
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It is also opening a similar plant in Germany.
He said: “We already make the fundamental raw material which is pure ethanol at our Grangemouth site.
“It was apparent that there just wasn't enough gel in the market for people to get, certainly not enough for the NHS and even on the supermarket shelves.
“We thought: 'Why not actually take that ethanol down stream? Let's make the gel ourselves, let's bottle it and get it out there.' So that's what we decided to do about a week ago.
“It's going to be made at our site in Newton Aycliffe, near Middlesbrough. It's a site where we already have expertise in this type of chemistry.
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“It's not complicated chemistry, let's be clear. It's a compounding site where we take different chemicals and basically compound them up into mixtures.
“So we've got that expertise there to do it. We've got a spare building we can use. We've ordered all the kit and that arrived over the weekend.
“We're installing it as we speak and we hope to have it up and running by the end of the week so we're in production by the 10 days we talked about.”
Ineos is also building a sanitiser plant in Germany and has said it will initially supply the NHS and other public services, before making bottles available to the public.
Mr Crotty said Ineos would normally spend around six months researching such a project but had decided to move quickly to meet the need.
He added: “There was this bottleneck so we decided someone's got to address it. We're a big company and we've got a lot of people we can throw at this very quickly. A lot of the manufacturers are much smaller scale so let's get on and do this.”