there's a very interesting article about bottled water in the recent edition of "fast company" magazine- not that i read "fast company" magazine ("Fast Company is the magazine for a generation of business leaders with high expectations for their companies -- and even higher expectations for themselves.") or had really actually ever heard of it, until there was a news story on NPR about this article and the bottled water phenomenon in general. here is a small excerpt:
"And for this healthy convenience, we're paying what amounts to an unbelievable premium. You can buy a half- liter Evian for $1.35--17 ounces of water imported from France for pocket change. That water seems cheap, but only because we aren't paying attention.
In San Francisco, the municipal water comes from inside Yosemite National Park. It's so good the EPA doesn't require San Francisco to filter it. If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35. Put another way, if the water we use at home cost what even cheap bottled water costs, our monthly water bills would run $9,000."
1 comment:
I just read this and did not believe it. So I did the calculations. And they are right. The current WSA rate is $2.03 for 1 ccf (750 gallons). Through WSA you are paying $.0002532/ounce, but by the bottle you are paying 329 times that, or $.0833 per ounce!
Imagine that if we skipped buying one bottle of water we could ensure 3,948 other people around the world could get a clean glass of water.
Post a Comment