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In case anyone is wondered why there is benzene in hand sanitizer: Ethanol forms an azeotrope with water, which makes it impossible to dry completely without fu

In case anyone is wondered why there is benzene in hand sanitizer: Ethanol forms an azeotrope with water, which makes it impossible to dry completely without further processing. Benzene forms its own azeotrope with water at an even lower boiling point which allows for cheaply drying ethanol by further distillation; With the, in this case inconvenient, side effect of residual benzene contamination. Now you don't actually need dry ethanol for hand sanitizer, but the production capacity for fuel-grade ethanol is way larger than pharmaceutical or food grade.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
VLM 6y ago
To extend the factual data, benzene costs about twice as much as ethanol does (to one sig fig) so its obviously a contamination or production mistake as opposed to a money saving opportunity. Wet ethanol is going to be a little bit cheaper to make than contaminated dry ethanol, so its a mistake or supply demand thing. As such there is little point in the FDA doing a recall; I thought hand sanitizer went out of style around the time masks came into style. Use by the general public of both seems to have virtually no effect on long term population transmission rate. "Feel good" "keep them busy" activities.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- asveikau 6y ago
  Anecdotally, hand sanitizer is quite popular in places I come across in San Francisco. Some businesses require a squirt of it at entry.
  - fho 6y ago
    It's basically mandatory in every grocery store in Germany ... and every other store follows suit.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      Even not in a pandemic, the grocery store thing especially makes sense. You'll be touching products that will make it into somebody else's mouth. (Hopefully with a wash in between, but you never know.)
      - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
        Where I live in the US, I've never seen any business require hand sanitizer use.
        wkearney99 6y ago
        In a small sampling of places I've been in the MD metro DC area it's not uncommon they have a dispenser at the door, prominently placed to indicate suggested use. A few places have personnel dispensing it, some in a manner that does not suggest it being optional.
        aarongolliver 6y ago
        (USA, pre-pandemic) I've seen "mandatory" hand sanitizer use exactly once, at a camp which had some nasty norovirus outbreaks (which was misery, especially I'm sure for people who had to fight over shared bathrooms). Now I see it at the entrance of most businesses / by checkout registers.
        dividedbyzero 6y ago
        In the major metropolitan area in Germany where I live, I've seen this only once at a hairdresser last summer. None of the grocery stores I've been to has required this (though many now offer it)
      - hedora 6y ago
        Hand sanitizer drys out skin by removing the protective lipid barrier. It has not been shown to decrease disease transmission, and there’s good reason to think it increases disease transmission by letting oozy stuff pass in and out of skin. Put another way, would you rather eat: - whatever microbes are on a stranger’s hand (probably picked up at the store, and mostly non-pathogenic) - or whatever toxins are in the hand sanitizer, along with whatever bodily fluids seeped out of said stranger’s dry, cracked skin? Covid might change the tradeoff a bit, but I’m skeptical.
  - SilverRed 6y ago
    You could bring your own known safe bottle. I really doubt they would mind as long as they see you use something.
- tzs 6y ago
  > As such there is little point in the FDA doing a recall; I thought hand sanitizer went out of style around the time masks came into style. There are people who have occasion to use hand sanitizer for reasons unrelated to COVID.
- oasisbob 6y ago
  Nature news has a nice article from earlier this year rounding up some of the data and changes in recommendations on the spread of the coronavirus through fomites: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4 Seems like an easy case where hindsight is 20/20.
  - darkwater 6y ago
    There is this nugget of wisdom in that article > Nevertheless, scientists warn against drawing absolute conclusions. “Just because viability can’t be shown, it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t contagious virus there at some point,” says epidemiologist Ben Cowling at the University of Hong Kong. So, some actions might actually be "feel good" ones but also completely dismissing a possible way of infection is not that wise.
  - dimal 6y ago
    Except that it never seemed to make any sense, even at the time. Early on, we were seeing cases double every three days. It seemed extremely unlikely that that level of transmission could come from surfaces alone. The most reasonable early guess should have been that it's airborne. Yet experts were telling people to wash their hands and NOT wear masks. Maybe they were conflating "no evidence of airborne transmission" with "evidence of no airborne transmission"? And we were told not to wear masks, yet we also needed to make sure that health care workers had PPE. But if masks were bad for us, why were they necessary for them? Maybe they wanted to conserve limited supply for the front line?
    - vkou 6y ago
      > Yet experts were telling people to wash their hands and NOT wear masks. Experts were telling people that wearing non-n95 masks is unlikely to protect you from other sick people. They are still correct on that point. You primarily wear cloth masks to protect other people, not to protect yourself.
      - mannerheim 6y ago
- rarefied_tomato 6y ago
  The benzene is the money-saving opportunity. Per GP it's added to avoid a costly drying process. The cost of removing the trace benzene would nullify those savings.
  - pushrax 6y ago
    Though 96% ethanol via cheap distillation is fine for hand sanitizer, so the only real explanation is they're leveraging existing supply chains (as described) or have made a mistake.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  If you wait for someone else to protect you from life's dangers, you'll be waiting a long time. Personally, I've decided to remove most "products" from my life, as much as possible, and I feel much better for it.
lumost 6y ago
The contamination problem in common household products seems like something either the FDA/USDA/EPA should be monitoring. I can understand someone seeing an opportunity for making cheaper sanitizer and not recognizing the benzene risk they were passing on to customers. Given that this person probably didn't even know they should be testing for benzene - I don't see how the industry could self-regulate benzene presence in hand sanitizers. Even if this became an issue, I wouldn't be surprised to see benzene-free labels slapped on benzene contaminated sanitizer by virtue of incompetence. Are there any agencies currently tasked with randomly sampling products that consumers come into contact with for contamination?
- _jal 6y ago
  Self-regulation without any compliance verification is called a polite request. If people would like to see this sort of thing actually work, that requires real regulation. The kind you see when important people actually care about outcomes, not the PR management you see for, e.g., the food supply.
  - clairity 6y ago
    if any regulation should be enacted, it's to restrict sanitizer use to waste handling, food prep, and healthcare use, which is where it may actually do some good reducing infection transmission, not in everyday activities where it's merely a potentially dangerous evolution-inducing palliative. instead of regulation, let's just promote soap over sanitizer, which is as effective against pathogens without the unintended side-effects.
    - lukeschlather 6y ago
      Sanitizer is simply inferior to soap. Professionals in waste, food prep, and healthcare should really never use sanitizer, they should just provide sinks and soap.
      - clairity 6y ago
        i actually generally agree with that assessment, although i can see instances where sanitizer can be useful, like changing a series of diapers at a daycare, or servers at a restaurant.
adonovan 6y ago
Our high-school chemistry teacher told us that if one ever needs to party in a lab, mix orange juice with the 97% ethanol, but avoid the 99%. The former is distilled with water, but the latter with benzene. Number of times I have saved someone's life with this trivia: zero, but still hopeful.
- 0xbadcafebee 6y ago
  Stupid question: would 99% alcohol (as in for cleaning electronic parts) also potentially have the benzene residue?
bayswater2p 6y ago
I'm not convinced by your powerful suggestion that simply caling it inconvenient is doing us justice...
fuzzfactor 6y ago
IME with industrial alcohols, different entities will have different amounts of leeway and with ethanol in particular in the US there are some of the most bizarre regulations. Natural agricultural ethanol or distilled beverage grade ethanol is highly taxable by numerous agressive collectors so major obstacles to industrial use have long been overcome by _denaturing_ the otherwise natural grain alcohol, by adding a poisonous or disagreeable substance to discourage consumption and therefore avoiding any beverage taxes. Different denaturants are expected to be used for different end uses of the ethanol, but fundamentally anything (on the list) will do since the primary motivation is taxation/regulatory not function/purpose. Here is the list, some in the Specially Denatured Alcohol (SDA) category are also approved for personal use by the FDA: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151 Notice that using plain gasoline (leaded) as well as unleaded for denaturant will introduce some benzene to the ethanol since gasoline almost always contains at least a fraction of a percent benzene naturally. Also, the alternative _High Octane Denaturant Blend_ for CDA20 would be just fine having up to 1.1 percent benzene: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.112-T3 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.112-T3 Now the Acetaldehyde _denaturant_ that could be used to exempt an industrial alcohol from beverage tax is actually often found naturally in lower-grade less-refined agricultural ethanol, so it originates like an ordinary non-beverage solvent. Once this type material arrives in a common bulk fuel terminal, often it will then be further denatured with a few percent of some fairly high-octane gasoline, carefully measured from a nearby tank. Since the Fuel-Grade ethanol they will be distributing has a maximum 2.5 percent additional denaturant allowed, and the gasoline is lower cost per gallon than the raw ethanol. The final fuel grade ethanol spec allows 0.06 percent benzene or about 600 ppm: http://www.cvec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/PRODUCT-DATA-SHEET-CVEC-E98_20180301.docx.pdf http://www.cvec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/PRODUCT-DATA-... Notice that anhydrous ethanol is not a consideration along this supply chain, up to 1 percent water is allowed in the ethanol that is going to be blended with gasoline for clean-air purposes. Also I was the one who originally proposed the use of method E-1064 for this precision measurement when we were drafting this specification to begin with. Seems to me like some sanitizer formulators are using fuel-grade ethanol sometimes whether they know it or not, or maybe trying to avoid mere automotive products and using a more carefully specified SDA material. But a version of SDA28A consisting of highly purified ethanol having only pure Heptane as denaturant could be obtained completely benzene-free, while a different version of SDA28A containing conventional gasoline as denaturant would be expected to contain both benzene and lead.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

VLM 6y ago

To extend the factual data, benzene costs about twice as much as ethanol does (to one sig fig) so its obviously a contamination or production mistake as opposed to a money saving opportunity. Wet ethanol is going to be a little bit cheaper to make than contaminated dry ethanol, so its a mistake or supply demand thing. As such there is little point in the FDA doing a recall; I thought hand sanitizer went out of style around the time masks came into style. Use by the general public of both seems to have virtually no effect on long term population transmission rate. "Feel good" "keep them busy" activities.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
asveikau 6y ago
Anecdotally, hand sanitizer is quite popular in places I come across in San Francisco. Some businesses require a squirt of it at entry.
- fho 6y ago
  It's basically mandatory in every grocery store in Germany ... and every other store follows suit.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    Even not in a pandemic, the grocery store thing especially makes sense. You'll be touching products that will make it into somebody else's mouth. (Hopefully with a wash in between, but you never know.)
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      Where I live in the US, I've never seen any business require hand sanitizer use.
      - wkearney99 6y ago
        In a small sampling of places I've been in the MD metro DC area it's not uncommon they have a dispenser at the door, prominently placed to indicate suggested use. A few places have personnel dispensing it, some in a manner that does not suggest it being optional.
      - aarongolliver 6y ago
        (USA, pre-pandemic) I've seen "mandatory" hand sanitizer use exactly once, at a camp which had some nasty norovirus outbreaks (which was misery, especially I'm sure for people who had to fight over shared bathrooms). Now I see it at the entrance of most businesses / by checkout registers.
      - dividedbyzero 6y ago
        In the major metropolitan area in Germany where I live, I've seen this only once at a hairdresser last summer. None of the grocery stores I've been to has required this (though many now offer it)
    - hedora 6y ago
      Hand sanitizer drys out skin by removing the protective lipid barrier. It has not been shown to decrease disease transmission, and there’s good reason to think it increases disease transmission by letting oozy stuff pass in and out of skin. Put another way, would you rather eat: - whatever microbes are on a stranger’s hand (probably picked up at the store, and mostly non-pathogenic) - or whatever toxins are in the hand sanitizer, along with whatever bodily fluids seeped out of said stranger’s dry, cracked skin? Covid might change the tradeoff a bit, but I’m skeptical.
- SilverRed 6y ago
  You could bring your own known safe bottle. I really doubt they would mind as long as they see you use something.
tzs 6y ago
> As such there is little point in the FDA doing a recall; I thought hand sanitizer went out of style around the time masks came into style. There are people who have occasion to use hand sanitizer for reasons unrelated to COVID.
oasisbob 6y ago
Nature news has a nice article from earlier this year rounding up some of the data and changes in recommendations on the spread of the coronavirus through fomites: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4 Seems like an easy case where hindsight is 20/20.
- darkwater 6y ago
  There is this nugget of wisdom in that article > Nevertheless, scientists warn against drawing absolute conclusions. “Just because viability can’t be shown, it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t contagious virus there at some point,” says epidemiologist Ben Cowling at the University of Hong Kong. So, some actions might actually be "feel good" ones but also completely dismissing a possible way of infection is not that wise.
- dimal 6y ago
  Except that it never seemed to make any sense, even at the time. Early on, we were seeing cases double every three days. It seemed extremely unlikely that that level of transmission could come from surfaces alone. The most reasonable early guess should have been that it's airborne. Yet experts were telling people to wash their hands and NOT wear masks. Maybe they were conflating "no evidence of airborne transmission" with "evidence of no airborne transmission"? And we were told not to wear masks, yet we also needed to make sure that health care workers had PPE. But if masks were bad for us, why were they necessary for them? Maybe they wanted to conserve limited supply for the front line?
  - vkou 6y ago
    > Yet experts were telling people to wash their hands and NOT wear masks. Experts were telling people that wearing non-n95 masks is unlikely to protect you from other sick people. They are still correct on that point. You primarily wear cloth masks to protect other people, not to protect yourself.
    - mannerheim 6y ago
rarefied_tomato 6y ago
The benzene is the money-saving opportunity. Per GP it's added to avoid a costly drying process. The cost of removing the trace benzene would nullify those savings.
- pushrax 6y ago
  Though 96% ethanol via cheap distillation is fine for hand sanitizer, so the only real explanation is they're leveraging existing supply chains (as described) or have made a mistake.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
If you wait for someone else to protect you from life's dangers, you'll be waiting a long time. Personally, I've decided to remove most "products" from my life, as much as possible, and I feel much better for it.

lumost 6y ago

The contamination problem in common household products seems like something either the FDA/USDA/EPA should be monitoring. I can understand someone seeing an opportunity for making cheaper sanitizer and not recognizing the benzene risk they were passing on to customers. Given that this person probably didn't even know they should be testing for benzene - I don't see how the industry could self-regulate benzene presence in hand sanitizers. Even if this became an issue, I wouldn't be surprised to see benzene-free labels slapped on benzene contaminated sanitizer by virtue of incompetence. Are there any agencies currently tasked with randomly sampling products that consumers come into contact with for contamination?

_jal 6y ago
Self-regulation without any compliance verification is called a polite request. If people would like to see this sort of thing actually work, that requires real regulation. The kind you see when important people actually care about outcomes, not the PR management you see for, e.g., the food supply.
- clairity 6y ago
  if any regulation should be enacted, it's to restrict sanitizer use to waste handling, food prep, and healthcare use, which is where it may actually do some good reducing infection transmission, not in everyday activities where it's merely a potentially dangerous evolution-inducing palliative. instead of regulation, let's just promote soap over sanitizer, which is as effective against pathogens without the unintended side-effects.
  - lukeschlather 6y ago
    Sanitizer is simply inferior to soap. Professionals in waste, food prep, and healthcare should really never use sanitizer, they should just provide sinks and soap.
    - clairity 6y ago
      i actually generally agree with that assessment, although i can see instances where sanitizer can be useful, like changing a series of diapers at a daycare, or servers at a restaurant.

adonovan 6y ago

Our high-school chemistry teacher told us that if one ever needs to party in a lab, mix orange juice with the 97% ethanol, but avoid the 99%. The former is distilled with water, but the latter with benzene. Number of times I have saved someone's life with this trivia: zero, but still hopeful.

0xbadcafebee 6y ago
Stupid question: would 99% alcohol (as in for cleaning electronic parts) also potentially have the benzene residue?

bayswater2p 6y ago

I'm not convinced by your powerful suggestion that simply caling it inconvenient is doing us justice...

fuzzfactor 6y ago

IME with industrial alcohols, different entities will have different amounts of leeway and with ethanol in particular in the US there are some of the most bizarre regulations. Natural agricultural ethanol or distilled beverage grade ethanol is highly taxable by numerous agressive collectors so major obstacles to industrial use have long been overcome by _denaturing_ the otherwise natural grain alcohol, by adding a poisonous or disagreeable substance to discourage consumption and therefore avoiding any beverage taxes. Different denaturants are expected to be used for different end uses of the ethanol, but fundamentally anything (on the list) will do since the primary motivation is taxation/regulatory not function/purpose. Here is the list, some in the Specially Denatured Alcohol (SDA) category are also approved for personal use by the FDA: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.151 Notice that using plain gasoline (leaded) as well as unleaded for denaturant will introduce some benzene to the ethanol since gasoline almost always contains at least a fraction of a percent benzene naturally. Also, the alternative _High Octane Denaturant Blend_ for CDA20 would be just fine having up to 1.1 percent benzene: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.112-T3 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/27/21.112-T3 Now the Acetaldehyde _denaturant_ that could be used to exempt an industrial alcohol from beverage tax is actually often found naturally in lower-grade less-refined agricultural ethanol, so it originates like an ordinary non-beverage solvent. Once this type material arrives in a common bulk fuel terminal, often it will then be further denatured with a few percent of some fairly high-octane gasoline, carefully measured from a nearby tank. Since the Fuel-Grade ethanol they will be distributing has a maximum 2.5 percent additional denaturant allowed, and the gasoline is lower cost per gallon than the raw ethanol. The final fuel grade ethanol spec allows 0.06 percent benzene or about 600 ppm: http://www.cvec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/PRODUCT-DATA-SHEET-CVEC-E98_20180301.docx.pdf http://www.cvec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/PRODUCT-DATA-... Notice that anhydrous ethanol is not a consideration along this supply chain, up to 1 percent water is allowed in the ethanol that is going to be blended with gasoline for clean-air purposes. Also I was the one who originally proposed the use of method E-1064 for this precision measurement when we were drafting this specification to begin with. Seems to me like some sanitizer formulators are using fuel-grade ethanol sometimes whether they know it or not, or maybe trying to avoid mere automotive products and using a more carefully specified SDA material. But a version of SDA28A consisting of highly purified ethanol having only pure Heptane as denaturant could be obtained completely benzene-free, while a different version of SDA28A containing conventional gasoline as denaturant would be expected to contain both benzene and lead.