ALMOST 2,000 bottles of hand sanitiser are being donated to communities by Glenkinchie Distillery.

Diageo employees at the distillery, near Pencaitland, are working in partnership to distribute the hand sanitiser to meet community needs.

Targets include emergency services, care homes, care in the community staff and volunteers helping the vulnerable.

Ramsay Borthwick, Glenkinchie Distillery manager, said: “We are delighted to have such a significant quantity of hand sanitiser to donate to the local community.

“We have such admiration for the people in our community working on the frontlines of the fight against this virus, and we are just pleased to be able to make what contribution we can to help them.”

More than 55,000 bottles of free hand sanitiser will be distributed to communities where the company has distilleries and operations, supporting local care services across the country.

Among those benefiting in East Lothian are Dunbar Basics Bank, as well as Dunbar Medical Centre, Lammermuir House Care Home and Belhaven Hospital.

The 500ml bottles of hand sanitiser have been made to World Health Organisation (WHO) formulation, with the liquid developed by a team at the company’s technical laboratories in Clackmannanshire, and production and packaging undertaken by staff in Fife.

This direct local distribution of hand sanitiser for communities in Scotland is in addition to an earlier global initiative by Diageo, which has seen 500,000 litres of alcohol donated to be manufactured into hand sanitiser for the NHS across the UK and Ireland, with the global total now exceeding five million litres of spirit donated.