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Africa: Pentair, partners open solar-powered community site

Pentair joins The Coca-Cola Company, Ericsson, Medshare, Phillips, Solarkiosk and TIGO Rwanda to open the flagship solar-powered Ekocenter in Ruhunda, Rwanda.

The site was designed to provide 25,000 local residents with access to services such as wi-fi-enabled internet access, mobile charging services, a retail store, the only fully lit football field outside Rwanda’s capital of Kigali, improved medical services and purified water.

Equipped with two Pentair water purification systems, the site has the capacity to provide up to 20,000 liters of drinking water daily to areas residents.

“With our proven expertise in delivering clean, safe drinking water in remote areas, we are thrilled to collaborate with Coca-Cola and the other partners to create a sustainable economic model to ensure we have lasting impact,” said Randall J. Hogan, Pentair chairman and CEO.

“Our engineers worked together with Coke’s engineers to design an innovative, durable safe water solution that is easy to operate on minimal energy in remote locations.”

“Ekocenter was started by Coca-Cola in 2013 as a social enterprise to empower communities while enabling business growth, and the Rwanda site shows how business, civil society and government can work together in a sustainable operating model to help communities,” said Bea Perez, chief sustainability officer, The Coca-Cola Company.

“Clean, safe water is a critical component in enabling economic growth and opportunities, and we are excited about our partnership with Pentair.”

Pentair has provided water purification systems for 22 Ekocenter sites in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Vietnam – including the flagship site in Rwanda.

The units installed to date can deliver up to 50 million liters of clean drinking water annually in Ekocenter communities.

The water purification units installed in Ekocenter communities are equipped with customized Pentair systems that utilize a combination of water purification technologies, and have been adapted to run on renewable solar power.

This combination of water purification technologies, including chlorine feed, iron and Manganese filtration, submicron prefiltration, carbon filtration and reverse osmosis technology, is extremely effective at eliminating or substantially reducing a wide variety of contaminants, including salt and other dissolved minerals, heavy metals, microorganisms, nitrates and pesticides.

As a result, the drinking water delivered by the Pentair systems exceeds World Health Organisation water quality standards.

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