KINGSTON — More than a dozen graduate students and faculty from Queen’s University’s chemistry department are volunteering to make hand sanitizer for local health-care workers.

Three teams of four students, with faculty oversight, are working to fill a request from Kingston Health Sciences Centre for 2,400 litres of hand sanitizer.

The project created a small flurry of activity for idled grad students in a chemistry lab otherwise shuttered by the COVID-19 shutdown.

“Normally this lab is usually teeming with undergraduate students,” Richard Oleschuk, the head of the university’s chemistry department, said. “We have the infrastructure, we have people who want to do it and we have the skill sets, so why not?”

Hand sanitizer has been in short supply since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the chemistry department was put in motion after the hospital indicated it was facing a shortage.

With hand sanitizer shortages becoming widespread, the chemistry department immediately ordered $20,000 worth of isopropyl alcohol from the United States.

“As soon as we got the request from the hospital, before we got approval for anything, we bought a whack of isopropanol from the chemical supply companies,” chemistry Prof. Philip Jessop said.

The students are mixing one of the two World Health Organization-approved formulas for hand sanitizer, using isopropyl alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, glycerol and sterile distilled or boiled cold water.

For the graduate students, the opportunity to do something that could immediately help local health-care workers on the other side of campus was motivating.

“This is a good opportunity for us to contribute to society. That is what makes us very happy. It is very satisfying,” graduate student Karthik Devaraj said.

Devaraj said the actual work that goes into mixing chemicals into hand sanitizer is similar to most other chemistry work, but the end use is what makes the project more significant.

“Everything is the same, the purpose is different,” he said.

“I think it is very exciting for them,” Prof. Jessop added. “A lot of their research has the potential to help society, but it is always rather remote and it is never 100 per cent likely that it is going to be helpful. Here, they know what they are doing is helpful and it is going to happen soon.”

For graduate students, the actions of mixing the chemicals in the right quantities are not hard, but Health Canada required the chemistry department to put procedures in place to make sure the final product is safe and effective.

“The chemistry is easy, really simple. That’s the problem. It doesn’t take a graduate degree in chemistry to mix those chemicals together, but if you do it wrong, people get hurt,” Jessop said.

There have been incidents in other areas where hand sanitizer that was mixed improperly ended up burning the skin of people who used it, but if the hand sanitizer is too weak it may not kill the germs it is meant to.

The graduate students double-check each other’s work throughout the process and the final product is tested twice, three days apart, to make sure it is good.

Once the hand sanitizer order for the hospitals has been filled, Jessop said the students may continue their work to supply long-term care homes or other health-care facilities that are in need.