The Economics of Water

Charles Fishman looks at the economics of water:

Sometimes the economics of water are as clear as water itself. And sometimes, they’re not. The disappearing water fountains make perfect sense for the arena. But what about the thirsty fans? Those who bought a single bottle of Aquafina at the Q were paying more for a couple swallows of water than they paid for a gallon of gasoline. In the cold case at a convenience store, you can get a half-liter of bottled water for 99 cents — 17 ounces for a dollar. The designer water in the same case, FIJI Water, costs 50 percent more, $1.49 for a half-liter, with the square bottle at no extra charge.
How incredible is that? If you drank the 99-cent bottle today, then took the bottle home and continued to use it, you could refill it every day with tap water until July 3, 2017, before you’d spent 99 cents on the tap water. Even the cheap bottled water is 2,000 times more expensive than the water we’ve got on tap at home.

He summarizes with this:

In the U.S., we spend $21 billion a year on bottled water. We spend $29 billion maintaining our entire water system: the pipes, treatment plants, and pumps. We spend almost as much on crushable plastic bottles as we do on our most fundamental infrastructure system.
That’s why, in Philadelphia, where I live, we have 3,300 miles of water mains — and the water department replaces 20 miles of main a year. A 160-year replacement cycle. It’s fine to indulge in a bottle of FIJI Water, just not at the expense of the water system itself.

Water is amazingly cheap, but that distribution system is rapidly aging and expensive to replace.  Bottled water sucks.