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Jowa: Safe water solutions

Jowa, a Sweden-based marine water treatment specialist which has more than 60 years of experience, is making efforts to enhance safety levels of drinking water onboard ships and also protect the marine environment by introducing Jowa Safe Water.

With the decline of the Swedish shipbuilding industry in the 1980s Jowa focused on the export market. The company opened a Shanghai office in 1995 and has also expanded its footprint to many countries in the world including Singapore, the US, Greece, Norway, Holland and Germany.

Jowa covers a wide range of equipment for water treatment on- and overboard. The latest product in the company’s portfolio is Jowa Safe Water, which guarantees safe drinking water by using ultrafiltration technology as a biological barrier meaning that no viruses and bacteria can pass.

According to Peter Ericsson, managing director of Jowa, a lot of the waste in the ocean today comes from ships.

A crew of 15 can consume 10,000 1.5 litre plastic bottles per year, according to Jowa, something it is keen to reduce.

“From experience we know that the crew does not want to drink the water stored onboard as it isn’t always safe to drink,” Ericsson says.

The idea with Jowa Safe Water is that a vessel is equipped with one to four tap stations placed in high crew traffic spaces and the crew uses their own personal steel bottle which is delivered together with the unit.

The Jowa development comes as the International Marine Purchasers Association tries hard to motivate owners and management companies to act now to reduce plastic onboard for environmental reasons.

“That is very interesting for us also. There is also an economical aspect of it that they can actually over time reduce the cost of drinking water. We estimate that the payback time is in most cases well below two years for Jowa Safe Water,” Ericsson says.

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