The True Cost of Bottled Water
87Nice Amenity, Giant Markup
Bottled water is a nice amenity to offer your staff and clients, but it carries a huge markup for not much added value. Leaving aside the hidden environmental costs of producing (and disposing of) those plastic bottles, let’s examine what that bottled water does to your profits.
You can get a pack of 24 half-liter bottles of water for $15.18 (not including shipping). That works out to about $1.27/liter, or $4.81/gallon, a couple dollars more than a gallon of gasoline, depending on where you live.
My municipal tap water costs me $1.25 for 100 cubic feet, or about $0.0017 per gallon. If the taste of your tap water is unappetizing, you can use a filter. The water filters available at the grocery store are activated charcoal filters that adsorb (yes, ad sorb), or chemically attract, organic contaminants and chemicals like chlorine. Chlorine is added to most municipal water supplies. It kills bacteria and is the reason some people dislike the taste of tap water. A typical filter can process 100 gallons of water and costs about $20. Brita and PUR make good ones. That works out to a price of $0.2017 per gallon, or about $0.05 per liter.
What Bottled Water Really Is
You may be surprised by this, but the store-brand bottled water you're likely to buy is actually tap water. No, really: read the label. Chances are, there's a phrase something like this somewhere on there: "Purified water from a municipal source."
That's tap water, my friends. You're paying a markup of about 283,000%* for someone to filter some tap water and put it into bottles for you.
To be sure, it's possible that the water in question is distilled rather than filtered. Distillation is the process of evaporating water from one container, moving the water vapor into a different container, and condensing it there. The condensed water vapor is pure, and the (solid) impurities get left behind. If your bottle is full of filtered water, it's most likely that the filter in question is a reverse-osmosis type, in which the tap water is forced under pressure through a microscopically fine filter. The label will tell you if your particular bottle of water has been distilled or filtered.
But when it all comes down to it, you're probably paying for processed tap water that's not so very different from what comes out when you turn on the sink.
*No, really, it's that big of a markup. Get your calculator and do the math: $4.81 per gallon of bottled water divided by $0.0017 per gallon of tap water, times 100, equals an obscene price difference. I rounded off to the nearest thousand.
What Bottled Water Really Costs
For our purposes, we'll assume that you're the owner of a business that employs ten people, including yourself. Assume that a ten-person office staff office uses three 24-packs of bottled water a week. (One bottle per person for lunch works out to just under 50 bottles per week, plus any incidental drinking and bottles offered to guests.) That’s $45.54 per week, or $2368.08/year (not including the 3744 half-liter bottles your staff will have to recycle or otherwise dispose of). If you were to switch to using filtered tap water, you would pay $1.92/week, or $99.68/year for the same amount of water, or $199.36 if your water consumption were to double.
Bottled water is over 20 times more expensive than filtered tap water (do the math). Of course, there are times when you’ll want to offer bottled water to a visitor. With the money you save by using tap water for daily consumption, you could buy a 24-pack of Perrier® every month ($39.99, or $479.88/year) and still have $1788.52 left at the end of the year. What could you do with that extra money?
Opportunity Costs
There are plenty of things that a small business owner could do with nearly two thousand dollars. Here are some of them.
Top Ten Material Goods You Can Pay Cash For With Your Water Savings
| 1. |  | Sweet color laser printer. (This is another money saver; laser printers have a higher up-front cost, but inkjets have an exponentially higher cost per page.) Amazon Price: $1,445.00 List Price: $2,477.00 |
| 2. |  | Mighty table saw. (Maybe your business involves woodworking?) Amazon Price: $2,290.00 |
| 3. |  | I couldn't resist putting in a lightsaber. You could buy one of these for each member of your 10-person staff for about half what you'll save by using filtered tap water for a year. Amazon Price: $99.99 List Price: $119.99 |
| 4. |  | Do you have a fitness area at the office? You can. Buy two of these with your water savings and you can have a brainstorming session while you sweat. Amazon Price: Too low to display List Price: $999.00 |
| 5. |  | I don't know this firsthand, but I'm told that a lot of deals get made on the links. Your water savings can get you some mighty nice clubs. Beware of the water hazards. Amazon Price: $1,500.00 |
| 6. |  | For you, or for someone else. Amazon Price: $4,226.50 |
Of course, you don't have to use the extra cash for stuff. With the nearly two grand you'll have left over at the end of the year, you can give your ten person staff each an extra $200 in their year-end bonus check. You could buy some radio ads. You could hire someone to make your website look professional. You could sponsor a Little League team. You could donate to your favorite charity. You could make a bigger contribution to your Roth IRA or your kids' college fund. Think about the possibilities.
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I like where you are going with your argument, but I'd like to have seen discussion of using alternatives. For example, we have switched form bottled water to a pitcher with a built-in filter and we have reusable bottles that we fill.
Refilling and reusing bottles is a great idea, Earl, but those bottles do need to be washed--even if only one person uses each bottle--or they'll develop a "biofilm" that can host nasties that'll make you sick.
In the British Treasury (our Government Finance and Budget Office) they have bottled water at meetings. They are glass bottles and are refilled from the tap.
Everyone thinks they have the amenity of bottled water, but it costs nothing.
Gordon Brown when Chancellor noticed a bottle label was torn and asked about it. The civil servant concerned got a pat on the back and somehow the story leaked to the press.
Another great Hub! Thanks for sharing!
Great hub! Invest in a water filter and a reusable water bottle! You will save so much money! Check out http://advancedwaterfilters.com/ for the filter.
Hi I followed your link from your forum post. Well, I think bottled water is a very hot button issue.
I live in the desert and I don't drink my own well water.
Most residents in town depend on bottled drinking water.
Even when you go the restaurant the tap water served tastes very yucky, over clorinated.
Water is a hot topic issue.
Why ban water bottles from people who can't drink their own tap.
You could mention the cons of tap water. On NPR a few days ago a writer mentioned the problems in Pennsylvania of water combusting from the tap.
Those of us who depend on bottled water know that those PET bottled might not be so healthy but you can build homes and schools with them like a German architect did in Nicaragua.
So you could expand this article considreably.
Add more links.
Pet bottles: future building material?
What's in your tap water?
What's in your well water?
Are water filers safe?
Ask yourself.
This is a good hub and explains the wasted money people spend to buy tap water. Pretty funny really. Perhaps we could sell bottles of country air in LA or NYC? Might be a market for it. Getting your hub more action is partly exactly what you have done: bringing it to a forum. I followed your link here and I am leaving a comment. This will make the hub have new content and it will come back up in the traffic. Nice job.
I love your descriptions of the items that can be purchased with the water savings. Great article!
I work in the public drinking water industry and would like to add 2 points to your discussion. 1) if chlorine taste & odor from your tap water is bothersome, then an open pitcher (without a top) of water kept in the refrigerator overnight might be the answer. The chlorine will dissipate. Remember to keep it cooled though; lack of chlorine leaves the water susceptible? to bacteria. Think of it now as a food. 2) new EPA drinking water regulations that go into effect in 2012 may be pushing drinking water utilities (like mine) to invest in GAC (granulated activated carbon) as part of the treatment process. This will reduce taste & odor problems that occur because of seasonal changes or source water greatly.
Thanks for the comments, PG! It's good to get input from insiders.
Excellent Hub! By not buying the bottled water you also are helping the environment as so many of those plastic bottles just get buried.
I buy about 3 gallon bottles of water a week. This water comes from a Mt. Shasta spring. It costs 1 dollar a gallon. The tap water in our area has flouride in it and I cannot afford a reverse osmosis filter to remove this crap. So not all tap water is safe they have found prescripton drugs in some. So not all bottled water is as you describe. I might be wrong but I can't find gas for less than a dollar a gallon, can you?
Ken, does your water come in half-liter bottles, or in gallon jugs? Most municipalities add flouride to the water. Why do you call it "crap?"
Gallon jugs of water are not what I've written about here. I've shown the inadvisability of buying water packaged in half-liter bottles.
Can you get water packaged in other ways? Yes, of course. You can also get those five-gallon carboys of water that you turn upside-down over the dispenser. Tap water is still cheaper: your $1/gallon is five times as expensive as $0.20/gallon filtered tap, and over a hundred times more expensive than unfiltered tap.
Of course, if you feel that the expense is justified, nobody can stop you from pouring your money down the drain.
Jeff
I gather you haven't done any reasearch on flouride. You might check out the flouride action network.
That's one possible interpretation of my question. Another might be that I know about the 'concerns' and have dismissed them as paranoia.
Guess which?
If it's paranoia then why has the scientists at the EPA (not the EPA it self) come out against it? Why has the CDC recommended a lowering of flouride to .07? Why are some cities putting warnings in their water bills to not use flouradated tap water for making baby formula? Why is it that studies in China show that the higher the flouride levels the lower the IQ in children? You talk about clean water then why do you support putting a drug like flouride in it? Read your toothpaste tube. If you swallow a pea sized amount of toothpaste (which is equal to about 1 glass of water) to call the poison hotline! Maybe you just drank too much of it when YOU were in school.
See, people who understand chemistry understand that there's this thing called "concentration," which tells you how much of a given chemical there is in a given medium. For example, in the air around us, there's rather a lot of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is poisonous. OMG! We're all going to die? Well, no, because the levels aren't highly concentrated enough to cause any harm.
Just like the levels of flouride in in most municipal water systems. Too much is detrimental, of course, but too much of anything is detrimental.
Further, nothing you've said has even challenged the fact that tap water, whether filtered or not, is way cheaper than even your $1/gallon spring water.
Finally, while I profoundly respect your right to disagree with me, I will not put up with continued insults. You've accused me of not doing my homework, and you've implied that I'm stupid (as a result of a flouride overdose). Don't do it again.
Sorry if you didn't like my comment I guess it was a little strong.
The problem with concentration is that there is no control over how much flouride you get. Since water is in most beverages and since most of that water is flouradsated tap water we are getting it from everwhere which makes an indivduals dose uncontrollable. Plus the flouride that most water systems use is waste flouride used by industry like ferilizer companies. Why is this put in our water? Because it is to expensive to put in toxic landfills! I agree tap water is cheaper than my spring water but just because something is cheaper dosen't mean it's good for you.
I always knew bottled water was a waste. I really can't understand the appeal of paying that much for something you can get basically for free. Thanks for putting things in perspective.
Thanks for stopping by, CW. Yeah, bottled water is a big waste of money, as well as a waste of water. I recently found out that it takes three liters of water for a bottled water company to make a one-liter bottle of water. Crazy, right? I say, filter your tap water and pour it into your own bottle. Much cheaper and just as good.
festersporling1 2 years ago
I always thought it was crazy bottled water cost more than gasoline, yet the planet is 3/5ths water. Is that not an epic scam? $1.79 for a 1 quart arrowhead bottle of water at any gas station.