CRISIS: Cuomo Made 11 Million Bottles Of Hand Sanitizer. Now NY Has 700,000 Gallons It Can’t Get Rid Of.

In the first days of the Covid-19 pandemic, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced New York would use prison labor to address a hand sanitizer shortage and make bottles that were superior to “products now on the market.” New York made so much of the “NYS Clean” hand sanitizer — a whopping 11 million bottles, to be exact — that it still doesn’t know how to get rid of it, Politico reports.

On a former airport runaway in Central New York sit 706,172 gallons of NYS Clean, in an array of bottle sizes, on 4,000 pallets that stretch the length of three football fields — out in the open, covered in tarps and likely never to be used, much of it already expired. It will likely cost New York million of dollars to dispose of it, possibly shipped out of state in hundreds of trucks to be incinerated, according to environmental experts and officials familiar with the process.

“There is a way to properly dispose of it,” said Diana Aga, the director of the RENEW Institute at the University of Buffalo, which studies environmental issues. “The issue here is the volume.” Read more at Politico.