This Simple Water Bottle Innovation Just Might Save Your Life Someday

Uproxx knows that science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines are driving the future of this planet forward. Every day, we see new ideas, fresh innovations, and bold trailblazers in these fields. Follow us this month as we highlight how STEM is shaping the culture of NOW.

Check out an exclusive Uproxx video about Yash Balaji along with stories about other STEM innovators here.

An innovator in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) will take a problem and tackle it head on — using innovative thinking to create new solutions. That’s what Yash Balaji did with clean water sources in developing nations. He wanted to find new ways to provide drinkable water to people living without it — and he pulled that feat off while he was still in high school.

Balaji invented CleanBottle in 2014, as a way to purify and decontaminate water using only the heat of one’s hands. The amazing device provides clean drinking water without the use of disposable filters or solar power, and it just might streamline the way we help people access water – from natural disasters to war zones. Imagine being able to provide water bottles that clean the water themselves for marines in the field or researchers deep in the Amazon.

“It’s so simple to use,” Balaji says. “You don’t need any batteries. You don’t need anything else. It’s all just contained within one system.”

Yash Balaji shows off his CleanBottle design.


Raised mostly in New Jersey, Balaji was born in India. During his travels back home with his family, he noticed that many people had to walk miles to get access to clean water.

“There’s a big struggle to get water for a lot of people,” Balaji says. “It’s the most basic necessity for life. Even if you don’t have food, you can still survive for weeks. But if you don’t have water, you’ll die within a few days.”

He recognized that the problems he was witnessing weren’t going away, either. “With global climate change occurring right now,” he says, “I think that access to water is going to be more difficult to obtain in the future.”

With clean water access affecting so many people around the world, the issue felt urgent and personal to Balaji. He decided he had to help tackle it. His answer was CleanBottle. The device slips over any water bottle and harnesses the Seebeck Effect, using thermoelectric generator tiles to power the purification process. It’s pretty simple to hear Balaji explain it: “On one side of the tile, it’s relatively hot from your hand contacting the tile. The other side is relatively cold and that temperature differential will create an electric current. I use that to power an ultraviolet c-light and the ultraviolet light is what purifies the water by killing microorganisms.”

Simple, right? By killing the microorganisms present in the water through this simple process, Balaji hopes to save many lives.

“A lot of the illnesses you’d get from bad water, come from microorganisms,” he says. “It’s not as much of a concern in the western world because our water supply is so regulated, but in a lot of the developing world — where the water infrastructure isn’t very good — or in the wilderness, there are a lot of potential microorganisms in the water.”

With CleanBottle, the ultraviolet c-light damages the DNA of these organisms to render them inert. So it doesn’t matter what is in your water trying to make you sick, CleanBottle will zap it so that it’s safe again.


It’s a revolutionary idea and one that has the potential to change many lives. Though Balaji says that even if he could just help better the lives of a few, he’d be happy. Now in college at Rutgers, Balaji sees this world as the only one we have, and feels that it’s his calling to help make it run more efficiently.

“I’m going to be living in this world for the next 70, 80, 90 years,” he says. “I want it to be a world that I want to live in.”

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