Water.org, the nonprofit co-founded by actor Matt Damon and engineer Gary White, is launching Get Blue, a consumer-facing campaign that bets corporate America’s retail footprint can do more for the global water crisis than traditional charity ever could.
Get Blue’s founding partners—Gap, Starbucks, and Amazon—are themselves significant consumers of the world’s water supply.
Gap Inc. consumed 28 billion liters of water in 2024, reducing or replenishing only 14% of what it used. A single cup of Starbucks coffee carries a virtual water footprint of roughly 140 liters, once you account for the water used to grow, produce, package, and ship the beans. Amazon, whose AWS data centers underpin much of the internet, doesn’t disclose its total water consumption. Google, which reported 6.4 billion gallons across its global data center fleet in 2023, and Microsoft, which disclosed 1.7 billion gallons the same year. Now, all three are helping solve the crisis their operations help deepen.
The initiative goes live Monday with those founding partners, alongside Ecolab, and is designed to embed water philanthropy into the mundane rhythms of consumer life: buying a t-shirt, ordering a matcha, asking Alexa a question. More than 2 billion people—roughly one in four globally—lack access to safe water at home, with many relying on hours of daily walking or unsafe sources.
