The Real Cost of Bottled Water

Americans purchase somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 billion plastic water bottles every year. Of those, a majority never make it into a recycling stream at all — most estimates put the recycling rate for plastic bottles well under a third, meaning the rest ends up in landfills, incinerators, or, worse, in waterways and oceans, where a single plastic bottle can take centuries to break down.

Here's the part that doesn't get said enough: when you buy a bottle of water, you're not really paying for the water. Water itself, at the tap, costs a fraction of a cent per gallon. What you're actually paying for is the bottle — the plastic production, the shipping, the refrigeration, the shelf space, the markup. The water is almost incidental to the price tag.

And in a lot of cases, what's actually inside that bottle isn't even the 'alive,' mineral-rich water you might picture when you think of a mountain spring on the label. A significant share of bottled water is just reverse-osmosis-filtered municipal water — the same process discussed a few days ago, minerals stripped, repackaged, and sold back at a massive markup. Dead water, in expensive packaging, marketed as pure.

None of this is really an argument for switching to a different bottled brand. It's an argument for not needing the bottle in the first place — for having water at home and on the go that's actually complete, without paying hundreds of dollars a year for plastic you'll throw away in minutes and water that's often less 'alive' than what's coming out of a properly filtered tap.

The bottled water industry isn't going anywhere. But you don't have to keep funding it to get water you can trust.