EcoDrops
What EcoDrops are
EcoDrops are what we give you for filling your bottle at a cafe, restaurant, hotel or drinking fountain that has joined BottleChallenge. You collect them with your phone and later swap them for a cinema ticket, a museum or a workshop. They cannot be bought or transferred, only collected.
How you collect them
Most of them come from the ordinary thing: drinking tap water instead of buying a bottle. Three other situations add to the balance as well.
Filling your bottle
Fill up at a place with the BottleChallenge sticker and hold your phone against it. That is the whole procedure. The refill is recorded on the spot and the EcoDrops are in your wallet before you leave.
Adding a place to the map
Know a fountain or a cafe that is missing from us? Add it in the app. Once someone has checked it, we add the EcoDrops, and everyone nearby gets one more place they can count on.
Inviting someone
You have your own invitation link. The EcoDrops arrive when the person you invited fills their bottle for the first time, not when they sign up.
Your first refill
We add a one-off amount the first time your refill is confirmed, so the wallet does not start at zero and the first reward is not months away.
Only holding the phone against the sticker counts. There is no way to type a refill in by hand and no way to buy EcoDrops, so a balance is simply the number of bottles someone really filled.
Why any of this exists
Tap water costs next to nothing and there is plenty of it in town. The hard part is knowing where to ask for it and whether anyone will mind. That is the problem we are working on, and EcoDrops are how we thank the people and the places that help.
For you
You fill your bottle for free, and you end up with something you can actually use: a cinema ticket, a museum, a workshop.
For the place with water
A cafe or hotel that pours a glass of water appears on the map and meets people who would not have walked in otherwise.
For the city
Every refill is one dot on the map of access to drinking water, and from those dots a city and its water utility can see where a person walks too far for a drink.
The wallet
Your wallet is in the app and on this site once you sign in. It shows the balance, the history with a date and a reason for every entry, and every reward you have collected together with its code.
- EcoDrops are valid for six months, counted from the day you collected them.
- When you buy something, the oldest ones go first, so they get used instead of expiring.
- Fill your bottle while your oldest amount has under thirty days left and we extend it once, by another month.
What you can swap them for
The rewards are things to go and do rather than things to put on a shelf: cinema and theatre tickets, museum entry, workshops, concerts, sometimes a swim or a spa. The list grows as more partners join.
- Some rewards have a fixed price. Others work as a discount, where you set with a slider how many EcoDrops you want to put in.
- After you collect one you get a code: sometimes ours, to show at the door, sometimes the partner’s own or a link to their box office.
- A reward does not disappear when you close the page. The code and its expiry date stay in your wallet.
Where the rewards come from
They are put there by cinemas, theatres, museums and brands who want to meet the people who drink tap water. If you run a place like that, you can add a reward of your own.
Become a reward partnerThe rules
Everything described here is written down properly: how much a refill is worth, how long EcoDrops last, what to do if a partner does not accept your code, and how to make a complaint.
Start with one bottle
Check the map for the nearest place that will pour you water, fill your bottle and hold your phone against the sticker. The first EcoDrops take a few seconds.