Offshore wind vessel serves “seawater” to avoid generating plastic waste

“Normally, we would buy pallets of half-liter plastic bottles of water that are handed out to the technicians and crew. But not only does that create a lot of plastic garbage, it’s not easy to find a place to store all those bottles on board the vessel,” says Andreas Luikenga, Contractor Specialist at Ørsted.

It tastes like normal water
A smarter system was needed, so Ørsted worked with the vessel supplier that built Wind of Change to set up a custom-built onboard system for desalinating and filtering seawater. The system is powered by the vessel’s hybrid electric-diesel engine and produces up to 40 cubic meters of potable water from North Sea seawater every day, helping complement the vessel’s many sustainable features.

The water is available chilled on tap
in the mess room, and at several other
points in the vessel. You can fill up your
own water bottle as many times as you
want, Luikenga says.

The vessel also uses filtered seawater
to produce carbonated water and soft
drinks from concentrates, which further
avoids plastic waste from soft drink cans
and bottles. In all, Ørsted avoids using up
to 8,000 plastic bottles per service trip.

Bottles stay on board the vessel
When technicians check in on board Wind
of change,they get either four or six
empty plastic bottles and
must register the number of bottles
collected.

They hand the bottles back when they check 
out, ensuring no bottles leave the vessel.

“The bottles are designed to be reusable 
and withstand high winds and rough weather. 
The half-liter size makes it easier to handle in
offshore situations than one-liter bottles,” 
Luikenga explains.

To ensure quality control, samples of the
filtered drinking water are sent for inspection
to the German port authorities at regular
intervals.