Your drinking water is public. Make it findable.
Fountains and refill points your city already maintains can serve residents and visitors many times more, once people can actually find them. BottleChallenge puts public drinking water on the map people already reach for when they are thirsty, and gives your institution a free dashboard showing how often it is used.
Non-profit partnership · No fees for public institutions
What your city gains
Infrastructure people actually use
Residents and tourists find your fountains in the app they already use to look for water. Every refill is one single-use bottle less in your parks, bins and rivers, and one less to collect and process as municipal waste.
Evidence for your investments
Each NFC-confirmed refill is recorded with time and location. A growing record of actively used fountains is a hard argument, in budget discussions and public reporting, for maintaining existing water infrastructure and building more.
A figure you can check
Figures come from the number of refills recorded, counting one 500 ml single-use PET bottle of about 20 g per refill. That is the whole method, and we publish it with the figures so anyone can check the arithmetic. We do not publish carbon, offset or equivalence figures.
Ahead of where regulation is going, everywhere
Around the world, public policy is moving in the same direction: less single-use plastic, more access to drinking water, and environmental claims backed by verifiable data. The EU obliges member states to provide free water in public spaces and restricts single-use plastics; the EU's green-claims rules ban vague, unverifiable environmental statements. Dozens of countries on every continent run bottle bans, deposit schemes or plastic-reduction programmes, and thousands of cities have their own climate and zero-waste commitments.
Whatever framework applies to your city, the common denominator is the same: you need measured, auditable results, not promises. BottleChallenge gives your institution exactly that: a documented, timestamped record of single-use bottles prevented on your territory, at no cost to the public budget.
And because prevention happens before the waste exists, it counts where it matters most: reduction at source, the first and most valued tier of every waste hierarchy worldwide.
How a partnership works
Talk to us
One conversation about your infrastructure and goals. A list of fountains, even a simple spreadsheet, is all we need to start.
Your water goes on the map
We publish your fountains and refill points, deliver NFC tags for dispensers, and mark the points as official city infrastructure.
Residents take it from there
You get promotion materials for city channels; refills start counting. Your dashboard shows usage and bottles prevented, per point and in total.
What the municipal dashboard shows
The dashboard opens in a browser and needs nothing installed at the office. Access is free.
Usage
How many bottles were filled in your area over a chosen period, broken down by place and compared with the period before. Seasons, days of the week and what happens after a repair or a relocation all show up here.
Coverage
How your places with free water are spread over the area, an availability figure per 10,000 residents, and the parts of the map where places are few or inactive. This is the material for deciding where the next fountain goes.
Residents and visitors
An aggregate split between people who fill bottles locally and those passing through, with no personal data. Useful when you need to tell whether the fountains downtown mostly serve tourism.
Fault reports
Residents report a fountain that is out of order straight from the map. The report arrives in the dashboard with its location, and your office changes its status once the fault is fixed.
Your own places
Keep your own inventory in the dashboard: fountains, taps, points inside public buildings. They complete the picture next to the places submitted through the programme and by residents.
Report and public page
A ready document about access to public water refill points, to download and attach to a report or put in front of the council. Plus a public page for your institution with a map of its places, to link from the city website.
The demo opens without signing in. Take a look, and we will gladly answer any questions it raises. It runs on a real London borough, with fictional figures and places.
Data, advertising, and what we get out of this
The questions an institution asks before signing anything, answered up front.
No resident data
The dashboard shows aggregate figures: how many bottles were filled, where and when, plus an estimated split between locals and visitors. There are no names, no accounts, no individuals in it. We need no resident data to work together: you hand over a list of places with water and a contact for whoever is handling it. Access to the dashboard opens once the request is approved.
No ads, no data trade
There is no advertising in the app. We do not sell personal data and do not share it for advertising or marketing, which is written into the privacy policy rather than merely stated on a page.
The data stays yours
Places with free water in your area can be downloaded at any time as GeoJSON or CSV and dropped into a municipal open-data portal or a GIS system. The map can also sit on your own website as an embedded widget, showing only your places or all of them.
A foundation, not a startup
The project is run by the BrainGreen Foundation, a non-profit registered in Poland under KRS 0000964547. What we want is for filling a bottle to be easier than buying one, and that is where our interest in this partnership ends. Public institutions pay nothing.
Your residents are already helping
BottleChallenge users can add public fountains themselves, location, photo, confirmation, and earn EcoDrops for it. Every submission passes automatic and community verification before it reaches the global map, and users report broken points, so the data stays current without central control.
For a city this means the map of your public water grows and corrects itself, powered by the people who use it. An official partnership turns that grassroots picture into complete, accurate coverage, with your institution named as its steward.
Cities can compete too
The Teams module works for public institutions the same way it works for companies: city hall employees, schools, libraries or whole districts join with one code and their refills count for the organization. Cities and regions can challenge each other, a friendly, public competition in preventing plastic waste.
It is a ready-made engagement campaign for residents and staff, with results you can publish. See how Teams works →
Let's put your city's water on the map
Tell us about your fountains, your goals and your timeline, we will propose a partnership that fits. Non-profit, no fees for public institutions.
[email protected]or use the contact form, we reply within two business days
Not a city? BottleChallenge works with other kinds of partners: