Single use plastic bottles are strangling the earth’s ecosystems. Every plastic water or soda bottle that we buy contributes to ecological degradation in the form of micro plastic — those small particles of plastic that are often invisible to the naked eye and can take thousands of years to break down.
Annual consumption of plastic bottles is set to top half a trillion by 2021. This means no matter how well-intentioned local recycling efforts may be, the earth’s oceans are in real trouble due to single use plastic.
Fewer than 1/2 of the single use plastic containers purchased in 2016 reached recycling receptacles, and just 7% of those were collected and turned into new bottles. Instead, most single use plastic bottles ended up in landfills or in the ocean.
Most people have no idea of the devastating effects of single use plastic. But an effort by prominent sailing teams, including an innovative new water purification solution, may be changing the way people think about single use plastic.
That example may be the start of other efforts around the world to change people’s single use plastic habits.
Volvo Ocean Race Stopover in Cape Town Adopts Water Purification to Reduce Single Use Plastic Consumption:
How can a city host a major tourist event without touching a single drop of municipal water?
The 2017-2018 Volvo Ocean Race, which is an international sailing competition that covers 11 legs over 45,000 nautical miles (83,340 km), had an answer.
This year’s Cape Town stopover generated about 32,000 liters (8,454 gallons) of daily clean drinking water for Race Village visitors through Bluewater refill points. As a result, the Volvo Ocean Race event did not impact Cape Town’s water reserves, which were low during the Volvo Ocean Race stopover due to ongoing drought conditions.
With Bluewater’s help, the Volvo Ocean Race Cape Town stopover avoided consumption of around half a million single use plastic bottles.
Bluewater’s purified water solution (see video above) allowed the Race to turn polluted and waste water into clean drinking water. The company’s global overview on the development of water treatment systems is related to the environment, plant breeding, and biotechnology improvement. Their approach focuses on phytodepuration — “phyton” = plant, and “depurare” = clean, purify. That process eliminates contaminant agents from waste waters by means of complex biological and physicochemical processes involving plants in the aquatic ecosystem.
Phytodepuration occurs naturally in ecosystems which receive contaminated waters, and it has been the classical system for water quality recovery, together with water self-purification. The process occurs in natural wetlands as well as in constructed ones. Bluewater phytodepuration is applied as photosynthetic organisms intervene, and those organisms can be plants or macroscopic or microscopic algae. Removing lead and most other toxic metal, chemical, and organic contaminants from tap drinking water, a high-performance Bluewater Pro water purifier can generate up to 1,826 US gallons (6,912 L) of purified water every day, which substantially reduces the need to purchase single use plastic bottles. The technology also slashes the water wastage commonly associated with reverse osmosis by up to 79%.
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