Why is bottled water so expensive? That’s the question business editor Derek Thompson of The Atlantic started with. His answer points repeatedly to how much more efficient tap water is, both for our wallets and the environment. Check out the stunning facts he revealed below, and the video from The Atlantic’s “Economics in Plain English” series. Perhaps the most astonishing is #7, after #1 – 6 sink in.
1. Bottled water is 240 to 10,000 times more expensive than tap water.
2. A single half-liter of bottled water costs as much as an entire day’s worth of cooking, washing, showering and toilet flushing with tap water.
3. If a family relied on bottled water instead of tap water each day, their monthly water bill would reach as much as $9,000.
4. Around 33 cents of every dollar spent on a bottle of water from abroad goes to transportation costs.
5. For every liter of bottled water you drink, the production process uses twice as much. So if you buy one liter of water, you are actually paying for three.
6. Most of the money bottled water companies spend is put towards not the water itself, but marketing and advertising.
7. Despite all that, Americans still spend $15 billion every year on bottled water.
Read the original article on the Huffington Post here.
[Photo by ntr23 on Flickr]
