The tiny island of Sandhamn lies around 30 miles east of mainland Sweden in the Baltic Sea, at the edge of the Stockholm Archipelago.
And that influx puts an unbearable strain on the island’s water systems.
Sandhamn’s natural aquifer reserves can only handle the basics: Delivering water to year-round residents and the island’s restaurants and hotels.
Bluewater develops proprietary water-purification systems that use a process of reverse osmosis, a relatively common water purification tactic that uses a membrane to remove ions, molecules, and large pollution particles from water.
They’ve installed four of their purifiers along the Sandhamn coast, where they extract water from the Baltic Sea, run it through the network of filters, and produce up to 30,000 liters of drinking water per day for newly arrived tourists.
Each Bluewater purifier links up to a network of three cisterns from which purified water is distributed to a number of small hydration stations along the Sandhamn marina.
Now that it’s been thoroughly vetted and certified, this “water microgrid” system, as Bluewater CEO Anders Jacobson calls it, is proving necessary for the small island of Sandhamn, as Sweden this year has faced record temperatures and drought-like conditions that have exacerbated the need for quality water throughout the country’s islands.
“But the solution for many consumers today is they go out and buy bottled water instead.” That, he says, perpetuates the use of plastics, which often end up in landfill or in bodies of water, where they further contribute to contamination.
“Our technology removes lead, so we were able to provide a solution that took away what was killing people in Flint in the municipal water supply,” Jacobson says.
We did that with the Baltic Sea, where we took water that was otherwise not possible to drink and turned it into drinkable water; we did the same in Cape Town, were we purified well-water.” Finding these other solutions that exist in nature but have not been able to be tapped for human consumption, Jacobson says, will be necessary to ensure that single-use plastic water bottles do not become the only solution for water-stressed communities.