999Bottle tracks your mitigated environmental impact one water bottle at a time

We all know that using a stainless steel or polycarbonate water bottle is much more eco than using (and tossing) a disposable water bottle. It's kind of the trendy thing right now. But do you really know just how much garbage and energy that you're saving the Earth from? With the 999Bottle, it's easy to find out.

A simple but practical idea, the 999Bottle is a 24-oz. ( .7 L) stainless steel water bottle with one unique feature: a built-in, rubberized turn-dial that lets you keep track of the number of water bottles you're saving from the landfill. Every time you fill the 999Bottle, you simply turn the dial to tick off one more bottle saved. The concept might seem almost too simple to warrant an entire product. After all, if you were really interested, you could get the exact same benefit by tracking bottles in your head or on paper. But who actually does that? The 999Bottle provides an instant reminder every time you open the tap or spring, so you actually will keep track.

Another advantage of the 999Bottle is that it comes with an accompanying iPhone app that puts your numbers into context. From what we've seen, some of the facts are trivial and whimsical (your number of bottles interpreted into how far Knight Rider's K.I.T.T. can turbo-boost the Hoff) and some are more factual (the number of miles you could travel on the oil saved from bottles). Either way, you get a little context and positive reinforcement for using the same water bottle day in and day out. The app also lets you team up with friends to track your collective impact. The 999Bottle system was conceived as a means of closing the gap between knowledge and action. Plenty of people know that disposable bottles (or disposable anything) are wasteful and environmentally harmful, but a lesser number actually make a concerted effort to cut their usage. By adopting the 999Bottle, people will have more concrete motivation for abandoning disposables. Artefact, the Seattle-based industrial design firm that conceived the 999Bottle, is currently trying to drum up funding on Kickstarter. Because it's a design firm, Artefact doesn't have manufacturing capabilities and is trying to get the funding needed to turn the bottle from smart design to market product.