TEL AVIV: Israeli scientists have come up with a "simple" and low-cost method to turn waste into ethanol for use as sanitisers in the battle against the novel coronavirus.

Professor Hadas Mamane of Tel Aviv University (TAU) and her team have been working for the past five years on recycling waste and transforming it into alcohol.

Now, in response to the global demand for hand sanitisers, they have focused on the production in Israel of ethanol to replace the need to import alcogels.

"Here we have paper residue from a factory, some straw from a zoo and grass collected from Tel Aviv municipality," Mamame said in her laboratory.

She inserted small amounts of each into a reactor and added ozone gas.

Ethanol has long been produced from vegetable sources such as sugar cane or corn, but in a complex and costly procedure.