109 new water cleaning devices to Solvatten

Since a few years back, we took the decision together at Aritco to not give any Christmas gifts to employees or suppliers. We decided instead to do 1 big gift, from all of us at Aritco to people that need this gift more than anyone at our company do; to give new Solvatten water cleaning devices to families in Uganda. This year we are not alone, several of our resellers in other countries joined forces with us, and together with the support from our owner Latour, the Aritco and Partners´ donation resulted in 109 new water cleaning devices.

Today 2 billion people are forced to still drink unsafe water and 159 million people have to drink water from open welds. This results in many different issues such as different illnesses and stomach diseases, which in the best cases leads to a few days of being sick and not being able contribute to the families daily needs, and in the worst cases lead to longterm consequences and sometimes to death.

But there are other consequences of not having clean water at hand. Cooking fires to clean water are often a solution that makes parts of the family, most often the girls, to spend several hours in finding firewood and not being able to go to school. The cooking fires are also a large CO2 emission issue, that the Solvatten project indirectly also contributes to limit.
PICTURE: Petra Wadström, founder of Solvatten

The 109 units that we jointly now can support the families in need with, helps a total of 872 people to get clean water for the next coming 7 years. This means about 4,6 million litres of water will be cleaned and heated through the devices. Several hundred children will be able to go to school and get an education instead of collecting wood to heat and clean dirty water. As well, there will potentially be 109 tons less of CO2 emissions without the cookingfires needed to clean the water.

”Being a part of such a project, that brings so many different direct and indirect effects is great”, says David Schill, Marketing Director at Aritco. ”And when our CEO, Martin Idbrant, suggested that we should engage our Partners to join in it became even better”, he continues.

Ellen Lagerholm, HR Director at Aritco shares that ”The pride, engagement and joy among all of employees that this project has created is truly fascinating. We have had competitions, auctions etc. to find different ways to raise additional money during the years. People at Aritco are really proud that we as a company take part in this.”
PICTURE: Ellen, David and Martin

During the beginning of 2020 the plan was to let a few of the employees visit the project and follow the impact at the site. To become one of the selected few, each employee had to apply with a short description of why she or he should be the selected to make the journey. The applicants truly shared engaging presentations. Due to the Pandemic this trip was of course cancelled 2020, but with the hopes for a better 2021 in terms of global health, a visit to see that change that these devices make in peoples lives would be amazing.

Ps! Did you know that the founder of Solvatten, Petra Wadström in December 2020 received the “Swedish Hero 2020” Award. Once again a great congratulations from the friends at Aritco for this award. Read our interview with Petra below.