Bluewater to help Cape Town save up to 500,000 single-use plastic water bottles from being used during Volvo Ocean Race stop-over

Around half-a-million plastic water bottles will be avoided during the upcoming Volvo Ocean Race stop-over in Cape Town, South Africa, thanks to the unique technology provided by Bluewater, a world leader in innovative water purification solutions.

Bluewater has joined forces with the Cape Town city authorities, V&A Waterfront, Volvo Ocean Race and 11th Hour Racing, an organisation promoting collaborative, systemic change for the health of the marine environment, to provide four hydration stations able to meet the drinking water needs of the hundreds of thousands of visitors expected to visit the Volvo Ocean Race village from November 24 to December 10.

“Bluewater stepped in to help the city and its citizens after learning that Cape Town’s water reservoirs are at critical lows due to the drought conditions,” said Anders Jacobson, CEO and co-founder of Blue AB, the Swedish holding company that owns Bluewater.

“Our partnership with 11th Hour Racing and Volvo Ocean Race provides us with an incredible opportunity to highlight Bluewater’s mission to provide clean drinking water to people everywhere and how our technology can make it more available for millions of consumers around the world.”

Anders said Bluewater looks forward to both showcasing its products and working productively with Cape Town to fuel the health experience with delicious water across the city’s Waterfront area, one of southern Africa’s key landmark venues.

“We are proud to join forces with Bluewater on this important project in Cape Town,” said Jeremy Pochman, 11th Hour Racing Co-Founder and Strategic Director. “This offers a great opportunity to work with the local community, event stakeholders and innovators to find solutions to a very serious environmental issue. Together with Bluewater we can also amplify the awareness of people globally about the threats to local ecosystems and the efforts needed to address them.”

"These innovative water refill points in our Race Village in Cape Town take our sustainable event management to new heights. We have a commitment to drastically reducing single-use plastics at all our stopovers, and the Bluewater refill points means we won’t impact the City of Cape Town water reserves while still meeting our plastic reduction goals. It’s a world-leading example of sustainable event management that we are very proud of and thankful to Bluewater, 11th Hour Racing, Consol Glass, WorldSport and the V&A Waterfront for together making this happen.” said Meegan Jones, Volvo Ocean Race Sustainability Programme Manager.

“As delivery partner to numerous local and international events it’s our responsibility to ensure we set an example of responsible and sustainable practices” says Bruce Parker-Forsyth, WorldSport CEO “We believe these Bluewater units set the ideal example of serving a need through innovation. We look forward to seeing them in action at our events in future."

Bengt Rittri, the founder of Bluewater and a committed environmental entrepreneur since his teens, founded the world’s leading air purification company Blueair twenty years ago, which he sold last year to Unilever. He believes greater numbers of people are fast becoming more health conscious and pay close attention to the water they imbibe and the food they eat.

“Clean water is a human right and Bluewater’s mission is to help deliver water solutions that do not put a burden on the planet’s health by reducing the need for single use plastic bottles and unnecessary transports from one side of the world to another,” Bengt said.

Anders Jacobson added that Bluewater will be brought to life across a range of consumer touch points such as the Volvo Ocean Race events in order to engage and immerse health minded consumers in a healthy lifestyle. To complement the live event in Cape Town’s bustling and thriving Waterfront entertainment district, Bluewater will execute a variety of promotion content across both social and digital media platforms to promote its clean water vision and mission.

“As a pioneer in innovative drinking water solutions, Bluewater’s mission is to make it easy for people to have a heathy lifestyle without doing damage to the planet’s health. Bluewater constantly works to innovate, make and bring to market water purifiers for home and commercial use as well as public dispensers that serve still and sparkling waters with zero calories and contaminants. We believe people want to combine doing good for themselves, for humanity and for the planet,” Anders said.

For more information, please contact:

David Noble, Bluewater PR and Communications Director, +44 7785 302 694 or david.noble@bluewatergroup.com