Originally Posted by
BobL
No - it probably just means they have paid to have it purified.
Like bottled water the cost of the ethanol in a bottle of ethanol is the minor component.
Ethanol costs very little to make - it's the packaging, storage, distribution and marketing/advertising that costs.
But claiming 100% purity for anything is a complete crock.
That's one thing I heavily trained in and practiced at work ie the the nominal level of impurities in any material..
And don't forget that water is not the only contaminant.
The highest purity lab grade ethanol I have seen from a specialist lab supplier was >99.8% pure and that was about $200/L
At work we further purified this by a process know as evaporative distillation - not to get the water out (in fact this process added water as we didn't care about the water) but to reduce the trace metal contaminants which were in the sub microgram per gram range. we used to lose about half the ethanol in the process
We also used to produce some of the cleanest lead free water on earth.
Starting with tap water, sediment and charcoal filters, reverse osmosis, double deionisation, triple sub boiling distillation.
At this point the lead concentration was around 10 femtograms per gram.
That's 6 orders of magnitude less that micrograms per gram (micro, nano, pico, femto)
Yet we did not claim 100%