Darius Adamczyk, chief executive officer of Honeywell International Inc., during an interview in New York, U.S., on Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2021.

Honeywell International Inc. is developing a coating for air filters that kills as much as 97% of the coronavirus and may be ready as soon as the end of September, Chief Executive Officer Darius Adamczyk said.

The chemical coating would need Environmental Protection Agency approval and Honeywell is enlisting the states of Texas and North Carolina as partners to help accelerate the process, Adamczyk said in an interview at Bloomberg’s New York headquarters. The coating will allow for a “drop-in” alternative to current heating and air-conditioning filters at schools and commercial buildings, avoiding costly upgrades for those systems to handle denser filtration.

“We are working with state officials who are partnering with us to really drive this through the EPA,” Adamczyk said Wednesday. “Think about that: Everyone is going care about breathing clean and safe air.”

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Honeywell has moved to boost production of personal protection equipment, such as N95 masks, and developed new products, including systems that automatically take people’s temperature as they enter a building and a robot that sanitizes aircraft with UV light.

Honeywell is seeking to have the coated filters ready by the end of the current quarter and has already done independent laboratory tests, which showed the product 97% effective at eliminating the virus. The market for the product, which was developed by material scientists at Honeywell’s UOP unit, could have a dollar value of “hundreds of millions, easily,” Adamczyk said.

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