Bali Water Bottle: How Reusable City Bottles Reached the Island's Resorts
After my first visit to Bali back in the 90s, I finally brought a piece of that memory back to the islands. This time it wasn't a souvenir I was carrying home, it was a bottle I was bringing in: the reusable Bali City Bottle, made from sugarcane, handed out to hotels and resorts working to cut single-use plastic and keep the beaches clean. Flying from Amsterdam to Singapore, then island-hopping by boat, my two sons Teun and Moos and I scootered cases of bottles out to resorts across the islands ourselves.
The bottle behind the trip
The Bali City Bottle is a 0.5 litre, two-piece bottle made from 99% sugarcane bioplastic, the same "green PE" material used across the whole City Bottle range. It's chemically identical to standard HDPE but grown, not drilled, which is why the material is CO2-negative across its lifecycle. It's certified food-contact safe under EU regulation EC 10/2011, contains no BPA, and survives a dishwasher up to 65°C, which matters when a bottle is going to be refilled hundreds of times over a stay rather than thrown away after one. The design itself is embossed rather than printed: a skyline of temple gates and a volcano silhouette raised into the white plastic, with "BALI" set above it, so there's nothing to fade or peel after weeks in the sun.
Why resorts hand these out instead of single-use bottles
For a hotel or resort, replacing shrink-wrapped mini water bottles with a reusable one solves two problems at once: it cuts plastic waste from housekeeping and turndown service, and it gives guests something they'll actually take home and keep using, which is a longer-lasting brand touchpoint than a bottle that gets binned at checkout. On an island chain where beach cleanliness is part of the pitch to tourists, swapping out single-use plastic at the source is a visible, checkable commitment rather than a line in a sustainability report.
Join the Pipe runs on a Buy One Give One model on top of that: every bottle sold funds a matching donation of a bottle to a schoolchild elsewhere, through Join the Pipe's registered Dutch ANBI foundation, which means the donation goes straight to the project rather than covering overhead. Join the Pipe marks its other mission moments the same way, treating them as part of the foundation's story rather than a side note. For a resort, that turns a bulk bottle order into a story guests can actually be told, not just a supply-closet swap.
Companies looking to do the same for their own hotel, event or office can order the Bali design or any of Join the Pipe's 80-plus city bottles with their own logo added, via a quote request, starting from a minimum order of 100 printed units.