Most of the price of a bottle of water goes for its bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, retailing and profit. Transporting bottled water by boat, truck and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. More than 5 trillion gallons of bottled water is shipped internationally each year. Here in San Francisco, we can buy water from Fiji (5,455 miles away) or Norway (5,194 miles away) and many other faraway places to satisfy our demand for the chic and exotic. These are truly the Hummers of our bottled-water generation. As further proof that the bottle is worth more than the water in it, starting in 2007, the state of California will give 5 cents for recycling a small water bottle and 10 cents for a large one.
This article convinces me. What a waste (in most locations).
So this means the actual cost of manufacturing the water is negligible?
When living in SoCal, all I drank was Arrowhead water. Plumes of toxins from nearby military bases and aerospace firms kept the tap water pretty much out of my system until well after I finally left the state. Bottled water wasn’t a strange luxury for my neighborhood. It was a necessity.
Admittedly, I lived only 10 miles away from the main Arrowhead well in Old Waterman Canyon, so at least we didn’t have it shipped in from thousands of miles away.