The Challenge
Today, people are thinking less and prompting more. What they don’t realize is that AI prompts require large amounts of water to cool data centers. In fact, 10-15 prompts consume 500ml or one bottle of water. With billions of searches per day, AI water consumption could reach 1,200B liters per year by 2030. This remains an overlooked issue, with low awareness among users, as data such as water footprint has always been invisible to the everyday user. To address this, we needed to make the hidden cost of AI visible and measurable for AI users and turn their digital habits into meaningful action.
The Solution
We conceptualized and designed Bottle it Back, a plug-in that tracks every prompt you make on all popular AI chat engines, including ChatGPT, Claude, META, Google Gemini, Perplexity, deepsea, Copilot, and Grok, turning AI’s water impact into a real-time commitment by visualizing the amount of water each prompt consumes in real time in a day or a month through bottles of water. With each prompt on any chat platform, the water level rises by 38ml. Monthly usage is also visualized through a consumable ring with a corresponding cost. Each bottle consumed is set at 0.05USD, the average cost to produce a 500ml bottle of water in the Philippines. The initiative is also the only model that allows users to instantly offset their water footprint by letting them donate the bottles directly to the Planet Water Foundation, which serves communities in South Asia and Southeast Asia with no access to clean drinking water. Bottle It Back was brought live on World Water Day, reached 47M people, and was installed in 40 countries, with 36,000 bottles donated.
