How much is bottled water delivery costing your business?

10/06/2015 Sidrah Ahmad

This may come as a shock, but did you know that about 45% of the world’s bottled water actually comes from municipal water supply systems? That’s probably better known as “tap water”. That’s right, major bottled water companies get about 55% of their water from natural springs but the rest is essentially tap water that is treated in their plants and filtration systems. The funny thing (or not so funny) is the price consumers pay for bottled tap water vs. filtering it themselves.

According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, in 2013 the wholesale price per gallon of bottled water was $1.21. Now this doesn’t sound like much, right? That’s pretty affordable.

But if you consider that in 2014, 1.32 billion gallons of bottled water was consumed by offices and residences in the United States who were using bottled water delivery services (3-5 gallon jugs), that’s about 1.6 billion dollars spent just on bottled water per year.

This may come as a shock, but did you know that about 45% of the world’s bottled water actually comes from municipal water supply systems? That’s probably better known as “tap water”. That’s right, major bottled water companies get about 55% of their water from natural springs but the rest is essentially tap water that is treated in their plants and filtration systems. The funny thing (or not so funny) is the price consumers pay for bottled tap water vs. filtering it themselves.

According to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, in 2013 the wholesale price per gallon of bottled water was $1.21. Now this doesn’t sound like much, right? That’s pretty affordable. But if you consider that in 2014, 1.32 billion gallons of bottled water was consumed by offices and residences in the United States who were using bottled water delivery services (3-5 gallon jugs), that’s about 1.6 billion dollars spent just on bottled water per year.

Water bottle delivery has actually been a service in the U.S. for roughly the last 100 years according to bottledwater.org. Imagine all of those billions of dollars thrown away on plastic water bottles over the years.

Now, let’s compare this to using our good old municipal water supply, or tap water:

In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported that tap water costs just over $2 per 1,000 gallons to deliver to families. They do mention that larger systems tend to cost less and smaller systems probably cost more. So if we double that cost to be safe we’re looking at $4 per 1,000 gallons of tap water. That’s four tenths of a cent per gallon. Compare that to bottled water’s $1.21 per gallon. Bottled water is 30,250% more expensive than tap water. That’s starting to sound expensive isn’t it?

If all of the tap water used each day came from bottled water, the average person's water bill would be $44,165 per year

The EPA estimates that Americans, on average, use 300 gallons of tap water per day. Pretty surprising right? That amounts to about 36,500 gallons per year which comes to an annual water bill of about $146 per person for tap water. If all of the tap water we used each day came from bottled water, the average person’s water bill would be $44,165 per year. Yikes!

Back to our offices and residences who are using those bottled water delivery services. If they switched all their water consumption over to tap water, their cost would drop from the astounding 1.6 billion dollars per year to a measly 3.96 million dollars per year. And remember that’s the total cost among all businesses and residences in the U.S. using bottled water delivery services.

Consider that this what we’ve laid out above is just the cost benefit of switching to tap water. If you consider the environmental impact of plastic bottles as well, there’s a strong case for why homes and offices should be using filtered tap water instead of a plastic bottled water delivery service. Did you know that 80% of 80% of recyclable plastic water bottlesplastic water bottles end of up in landfills every year?

If offices and residences switched to using filtered tap water instead, we could lower that number significantly. You can see the savings for yourself by using our bottleless water cooler cost calculator.

When you’re a business looking at your overhead cost, make sure you take a peek at your water delivery bill and see if you can switch over to a bottleless water cooler.