Heineken is upping the ante for year three of The Cities Project, beginning with a partnership with + POOL to help develop an Olympic-sized, water-filtering, floating swimming pool in New York’s river.
To support the initiative, Heineken has also partnered with Tribeca Film Festival to raise awareness of the project and engage fans nationwide with a virtual reality documentary developed by Tribeca Studios. Heineken is the official beer of Tribeca Film Festival. Heineken will have an activation at the Tribeca Lounge at Spring Studios, and will be poured at all official events throughout the Festival, which currently under way.
Heineken is asking the public to get involved by visiting SwimInTheRiver.com, where they can pledge to reclaim the river and swim in + POOL when the project is complete. If the goal of 100,000 pledges is met, Heineken will contribute $100,000 to the project’s development.
Each year, an estimated 27 billion gallons of raw sewage flows into the rivers surrounding New York. + POOL will filter out contaminants, cleaning up to a half-million gallons of water each day to create swimmable water in a floating pool. A separate VR, 360 video will show people what it will be like to truly reclaim the waters of New York City, and to swim in + POOL.
This August, Heineken’s support will also help realize a major public artwork on a New York river: a light installation, scaled to the size of + POOL, will colorfully illuminate and respond in real-time to shifts in water quality, educating New Yorkers about the state of their river. All of the projects and the progress of + POOL’s development can be followed on a newly designed website launched with Heineken on Earth Day: www.PlusPool.org.
As the beer that is enjoyed in the highest number of cities around the world, Heineken launched The Cities Project in 2015 and has supported initiatives and programs like James Murphy’s “Subway Symphony” in New York, Leo Villareal’s “Bay Lights” in San Francisco, Southern California’s Beautify Hollywood project and most recently, the renovation of Florida’s famed Miami Marine Stadium.