Bali Water is a member of 1% for the Planet. One percent of our annual sales — not our profit, our sales — funds IDEP Foundation’s work returning fresh water to the ground in Bali.
Bali Water didn’t begin in a boardroom. It began on an island, in a moment that stuck — the kind of afternoon where the air is warm, nobody is checking a phone, and time quietly stops behaving the way it does at home.
That feeling is what we’ve spent years trying to put in a can. The fruit, the fizz, the barefoot ease of it.
But you can’t take something from a place for that long and pretend you don’t owe it anything back.
Bali has always been a water culture. Its rice terraces, its temples, its thousand-year-old subak irrigation system — all of it is built around the movement of fresh water down the mountain.
That system is under real strain. Tourism development and over-extraction have pulled groundwater out faster than the rains can replace it. In parts of the island the water table has dropped dramatically in under a decade. Wells run dry. And along the coast, as the aquifers empty, seawater moves in to fill the space — a change that, once it happens, doesn’t reverse.
Most visitors never see it. They see the pools and the waterfalls and the towel folded into a swan.
One percent of sales. Every year. Good year or bad.
We chose the version of this that costs us something whether or not it’s convenient. That’s the only version worth putting on a can.
We direct our giving to IDEP Foundation (Yayasan IDEP Selaras Alam), a Balinese grassroots NGO founded in 1999 and based in Gianyar. IDEP has spent more than two decades doing permaculture, disaster resilience and community education work across Indonesia — and their Bali Water Protection program, run with the technical support of Politeknik Negeri Bali, is the island’s leading effort to restore its groundwater.
The core of the work is the recharge well.
A recharge well is the opposite of a normal well. Instead of pulling water out of the ground, it captures rainwater during the wet season and channels it back down into the aquifer — refilling the underground reserves the island depends on, and pushing back against the saltwater creeping in along the coast. It’s low-tech, gravity-fed, locally built, and proven.
Alongside the wells, IDEP runs education programs in Balinese schools teaching kids who live along the island’s rivers what an aquifer is, why their river matters, and how to look after it. Because a well lasts twenty years. A generation that understands water lasts longer than that.
Every can we sell contributes to putting fresh water back into Bali’s ground.
Barongs don’t announce themselves. They don’t post about the good they do. They stand between the island and what would harm it, and then they go back to enjoying the day.
Do the work. Fund the wells. Publish the receipts. Then get back to the moment.
If you ever can’t find those numbers here, ask us.
