Drinking water as pure as nature intended for Volvo Ocean Race visitors in Auckland

Auckland, New Zealand, March 2, 2018 – Aucklanders and visiting tourists are being given the opportunity to taste water as pure as nature intended as well as slash the need for single use plastic bottles during the current Volvo Ocean Race stop-over.

Sweden’s Bluewater, a world leader in innovative water purification technologies and solutions, is supplying purified still and sparkling water from three unique hydration stations designed to deliver drinking water free of all contaminants and to halt the need to buy the throwaway plastic bottles that threaten human and planetary health.

“The Volvo Ocean Race has been described as the toughest sailing race in the world, the ‘Everest of sailing’, yet is also setting the sustainability bar as high as it can to draw attention to ocean pollution and health,” said Anders Jacobson, Bluewater President and co-founder and CEO of Blue, the holding company that owns Bluewater.

Jacobson said Bluewater has made sustainability and planetary and human health core business values and is committed to ‘turn the tide on plastic with technologies and water delivery solutions that substantially reduce the need for single-use plastic bottles’.

Auckland is one of the sailing capital’s of the world, known as the ‘City of Sails’, and Aucklanders are no strangers to the Volvo Ocean Race, which has visited the city no less than 10 times since the late 1970s. The locals also embrace the Race enthusiastically, with tens of thousands of visitors pouring through the gates of the Volvo Ocean Race Village.

As Official Water Supplier to the Volvo Ocean Race and a Sustainability Partner, Bluewater has provided three of its drinking water dispensers located at key locations around the Race Village. In Auckland, the incoming water being used by Bluewater is supplied by the municipal authorities, but our solutions take it to a whole new level of drinkability.

Bluewater is proud that not only does it deliver water free of contaminants such as pesticides, gender bending chemicals and toxic metals like lead, but helps make that what you drink is free of plastic. Plastic, you ask? A recent study by Orb Media in the USA concluded that over 80 percent of tap water around the world today contained micro-plastic particles, while other research has indicated that 70 percent of deep sea fish have ingested plastic with additives such as flame retarders and colourants poses a threat to human health for generations to come.

Anders Jacobson notes that no place on the planet is safe from the single use plastic tsunami sweeping across the world’s oceans and lands. Some studies have flagged up that humans may already be suffering with indications that pollution of drinking water by pervasive gender-bending chemicals and hormones is leading to lower fertility rates and hormone disruption in young women and men.

In response to the multiple threats posed to planetary and human health, Bluewater founder Bengt Rittri, one of Sweden’s leading environmental entrepreneurs,late in 2017 launched a planet-wide movement geared to harness human ingenuity to help bring cleaner, healthier water to everyone and create oceans without plastic.

“Bluewater chose to become a sustainability partner of the Volvo Ocean Race because of the way it brings together the worlds of sport, industry, government, science and ocean advocates and allows us to showcase our innovative water purifier technology and solutions that are helping to combat the global crisis of ocean plastic pollution,” said Anders Jacobson.

For more information, please contact David Noble, Bluewater head of global PR and communication, at david.noble@bluewatergroup.com or on +44 7785 302 694.

Bluewater has signed the UN Environment Clean Seas pledge as part of the Volvo Ocean Race!