New Zealand Aluminium Smelter making its own hand sanitiser to combat COVID19 pandemic

Following World Health Organisation guidelines, New Zealand Aluminium Smelter Limited is making 103 litres of own hand sanitiser from its onsite laboratory. Smelter asset optimisation superintendent Roget Hackett said they collected the ingredients like ethanol, hydrogen peroxide, and glycerol under WHO guidelines and mixed in their lab.

Although the smelter is not considered an essential service, yet it is exempted from the four-week lockdown, considering the extensive costs involved in shutting down and restarting all the pots.

However, the smelter has adopted several precautions for continuing operations during the pandemic, such as dividing workers into two teams – blue and red and letting them work separately as much as possible with separate entry and exit points into the factory.

New Zealand Aluminium Smelter Chief Executive Stew Hamilton said they learnt a lot of precautionary measures during the pandemic from one of Rio Tinto’s factories that had a confirmed case.

Before the COVID19 outbreak, the smelter had 750 staff members and 200 contractors on site, but now there are 150-200 staff working at a given time in a day, said Hamilton.

Last week, the smelter closed its Potline 4 and relocated 35 workers to other areas of operations. This smelter was under review since October due to its inability to generate profit. The smelter used to produce 340,000 tonnes of aluminium per year.