This browser plugin lets you track your AI 'water footprint' — and ‘pay it back’ to communities in need

• This browser plugin tracks your AI prompts and 'water footprint' in real time
• It makes the environmental cost of AI feel harder to ignore
• It also lets you offset that usage by donating to a non-profit providing clean water to millions

A new plugin for Chrome, Firefox and Edge called 'Bottle It Back' tracks your AI usage across all the major AI platforms, and helps you give back some of that water to the people who really need it with a donation to a Planet Water Foundation.

AI is particularly greedy with its water usage because of all the water cooling that goes on in AI data centres. According to Bottle It Back, one AI prompt consumes approximately 38ml of water during the cooling process. Get to 15 prompts and you’ve used up a whole bottle of water.

When you're talking to an AI chatbot it's easy to forget that each prompt comes with that hidden cost to the environment. Chatbots may encourage us to “ask anything”, but each line we're typing is using up a tiny bit of water.

Bottles per day

I've been using the plugin, and when I saw how many bottles of water I was actually using a day it hit home in a very personal way. According to the University of Illinois Urbana, AI will drain about 1,200 billion liters of water by 2030. The amount of water I used may feel insignificant in comparison, but it felt like I owned it.

The plugin tracks all the main AI chatbots in real time, including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Copilot and Grok, so it doesn't matter which chatbot you prefer.

The point of Bottle it Back isn’t just to make you feel guilty, or encourage you to cut down on your AI — although it will give you tips — it actually offers you a way to offset your usage by giving water back to the people who really need it.

You can give back the amount of water you consume to Planet Water Foundation, a non-profit organization providing safe water access to communities in need across 33 countries. Its programs are focused in schools across the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America, and in communities impacted by natural disasters worldwide.

All you need to do is click on the ‘Give water back’ button in the browser extension to make a donation to the foundation that matches your usage.

Something we can do

There are obvious limitations to the plugin, since it doesn't work on mobile, and it does raise issue of where responsibility for the environmental impacts of AI should ultimately lie — should it be with us, the users, or with the AI companies? However, it does finally empower us to do something about our personal water usage.

Taking the water used by data centers and turning that impact into tangible, life-saving water for families that need it shows that small actions do matter. Our individual water usage might not add up to much, but it does ease any guilt you might feel over using AI — and if we all get involved, it can make a huge difference.

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