Environmental entrepreneur Bengt Rittri, founder and CEO of Bluewater – a company whose twin and entwined aims are to end global reliance on single-use plastic bottles and provide water ‘as pure as nature’ intended – is passionate about all the benefits of being on the golf course.

“I like meditation and I feel that golf is a form of meditation,” enthuses the 63-year-old Swede. “You walk and you observe, you see the nature, and you focus on something, the golf ball, and the highest level of meditation is when you’re outdoors and you’re social.”

What he doesn’t do, though, is play golf. “I was always thinking that I would start to play golf when I get older. That was my plan, but then I thought, ‘Maybe I got older’,” he laughs.

Years without becoming a golfer slipped by because of Rittri’s lifelong devotion to trying to do his utmost to take care of both the environment and those of us who live in it.

His level of devotion was exemplified by fairly rapid abandonment of a plan simply to “enjoy life” after he sold his highly successful air purification company, Blueair, to consumer goods giant Unilever when he was in his fifties.

He switched his focus from the provision of pure air to the provision of pure water and Bluewater’s scope expanded when Rittri’s investigation into the problems posed to the planet by plastics gave him considerable cause for alarm.

“In the Swedish archipelago where I live, I saw all these dead fish,” he explains. “I started to read about all the plastic in the ocean. “I did a lot of research about it around the world to try to work out how we were going to solve that, and I started to work with it. I thought one of the ways of getting rid of plastic was to get rid of the plastic bottles.”

Scientific scrutiny that showed bottled water contained hundreds of thousands of tiny particles of plastic that could be injurious to human health intensified his concern and led to the design and manufacture of refillable stainless steel and glass bottles that complement the use of Bluewater’s hydration stations and compact household purifiers.

The latter use Bluewater’s SuperiorOsmosis treatment process, which they claim removes up to 99.7 per cent of known contaminants from water, to provide locally sourced, purified and chilled drinking water.

If you have been to any of the recent Opens, starting in 2019 at Royal Portrush, you may well have quenched your thirst at one such station.

An invitation from The R&A five years ago opened the door onto the golf industry for Bluewater and subsequently led to last year’s announcement that the company had been appointed by St Andrews Links Trust as its official hydration supplier at the Home of Golf.

“We were contacted by The Open because they’d wanted to go plastic-free there and they’d looked around for all kinds of solutions around the world, and they said we were the only ones who could do it,” says Rittri.

“They thought because we had the greatest purification system, and we had water bottles, we could put those stations up at their golf course. In just a few months we organised it.

“We put up 18 huge stations around the golf course and then we made 100,000 bottles for them, so all the visitors that came could indulge in pure, cold or ambient water or carbonated water, and drink that and refill that.

“Even the players, from Tiger Woods to everybody else who was there, drank from our bottles.”

One estimate puts global plastic bottle sales at a staggering one million every minute. With recycling rates as low as nine per cent, this means more than half a million plastic bottles every hour are likely being discarded into landfill, being incinerated, or entering terrestrial and marine ecosystems.

As well as the damage caused to the environment, Rittri also is hugely apprehensive about the possible long-term harm humans might suffer as a result of the bottled water containing contaminants such as microplastics and nanoplastics. Most of these appear to come not from the bottle, but from the source of the water or how the water is processed.

Is there enough concern that we should all stop drinking water supplied in plastic bottles?

“We work with different specialists, one is Portugal’s Mirpuri Foundation,” says Rittri. “Dr. Ivone Mirpuri is a medical doctor and she co-wrote a white paper about this together with us, and she advised never to drink water from plastic bottles, especially if you are pregnant.”

Dr. Mirpuri, one of the world’s top medical experts on human hormones and how they are being disrupted by toxic chemicals, went further in an interview with Bluewater, saying: “Humankind faces extinction within 200 years unless steps are urgently taken to reduce the use of synthetic plastics and the chemicals in them.”

A chilling prognosis, although Rittri is optimistic that the tide can be turned. “I believe in human ingenuity,” he avers.

“We thought ‘how could we solve the problem of plastics?’ and we thought, ‘Well, humans came up with the problem to pollute the world and they will also come up with a solution how to solve it’, so we have done a lot of competitions for people and researchers around the world and innovators, and we also innovate ourselves. There are so many things that people are working on, so eventually we are going to figure it out.”

Although Bluewater affected its entry into the world of golf at the highest level possible, Rittri says its systems are scaleable so as to be suitable for any size of course or club. Indeed, all the way down to an individual home.

“Some people don’t think golf is environmentally friendly, but we want to show that here is one of the areas where golf can be leading, being plastic free and taking care of the environment, using local water and bottling it,” he says, and adds: “We can put up any number of water stations according to what is needed, maybe a few stations around the golf course plus one in the club restaurant.

“Clubs could finance it through subscriptions, by having a digital screen on the stations that provides information, but could also be used for advertising, or have sponsors who care about the environment who would maybe pay for the installation. Then we would have water bottles in the pro shop that they can sell and the golfers will refill.

“Bluewater bottles were developed for golfers. They’re easy to open with one hand, it keeps the water cold or hot for a long time, it’s a good grip and it fits in all kinds of golf equipment, so we call it the player’s edition bottle that we did originally for The Open. All the players really liked that bottle and kept it.”

Bluewater’s expertise and systems are in sizable demand among hotels around the world, and the company are also involved in other sports besides golf, in particular football and Beach Soccer Worldwide, sailing and the America’s Cup, and cricket and the Desert Vipers in UAE.

Just talking briefly to Rittri, it becomes immediately clear that the world would benefit greatly if it could bottle his enthusiasm, compassion and concern for both humans and habitat and share them around the globe.

But the world would be well advised before distribution not to package these precious commodities in plastic.