When it launched last year, the New York City-based startup Air Co. made the world’s first carbon-negative vodka—using captured CO2 instead of yeast to make alcohol. Now, in response to the coronavirus crisis, it’s using that same captured CO2 to make hand sanitizer instead. Air Co.’s version is unique in its environmental benefit. The company uses CO2 captured from nearby factories and then runs it through a process that combines it with water to make alcohol, distilling the final product in equipment running on solar power. The process is “inspired by photosynthesis in nature, where plants breathe in CO2,” Stafford Sheehan, one of the cofounders, told Fast Company in November. “They take up water, and they use energy in the form of sunlight to make things like sugars and to make other higher-value hydrocarbons, with oxygen as the sole by-product. Same thing with our process: The only by-product is oxygen.”