One dollar for a bottle of water out of a vending machine doesn’t sound like such a bad deal – it’s only a dollar! But what about compared to the price of tap water? Can you really justify the price differential?
Here is an excerpt of an article by GE Miller at 20SomethingFinance.com comparing tap water and bottled water:
“I recently got curious as to how much tap water I was actually consuming, which led me to doing this cost comparison. I discovered that my city provides an online water usage rundown. My city water bills measure water usage in CCF’s. What is CCF? It’s a unit measurement of water that is equivalent to 100 cubic feet of water. Distilling that down to units we can all relate to:
* 1 CCF = 748 gallons of water
* 748 gallons of water = 95,744 ounces of water
* 95,744 ounces = 4,787 bottles of water
* Basically, 1 CCF = 4,787 bottles of water
* What does 1 CCF cost? $2.10!
That’s right – 4,787 bottled waters could be filled with tap water for $2.10! So every time you buy a bottle of water for $1, you are paying 2,279 times what you would if you filled that same bottle with tap water.
If most of what you drink is bottled water, assuming you drink 64 oz. of water per day, you’d consume a little under 3 – 20 oz. bottles of water per day. Those 3 bottles per day would cost you $3/day or $1,095 per year. That same 1,095 bottles filled with tap water would cost you $0.48 PER YEAR. Another way to look at it is that as soon as you buy your first bottle of water, you’ve already spent double what you would for an ENTIRE YEAR of tap water. Wow.”
A four or five person jacuzzi of tap water is roughly the equivalent price as the vending machine water. Let’s be practical here, which would you rather have?
Photo: Peter Baker
true. the other important thing to consider is where you live, and thus the quality of the water coming out of your tap. i recommend doing research to check out where your local drinking water (or more generally potable water) comes from, i.e. what is the waterbody source (groundwater or reservoir are pretty typical). Then check on the quality of that resource-EPA is your best bet on that one. Because here’s the thing- there is a lot of stuff in our surface water and a lot of things contaminating our aquifers. You need to weigh that against the fact that there are virtually no water quality regs for bottled water.
I briefly forgot the #1 pedantic posts reader is a water expert! I should have consulted you before this post.
That all sounds like a lot of work … what regions need to worry about this? Is it only a concern if you drink large quantities of tap water? Is there some website that summarizes all of this, where I can just type in my zip code and find out everything I need to know?