You're buying it from a utility (water company) they're taking it straight out of the ground. It is an apples and oranges comparison. Most of what you're paying for is purification and the infrastructure cost piping it to your home/business, neither of which is true with groundwater.

Look, I am not defending these people, but to have a real conversation about this topic we have to at least get the facts right.

The law is outdated. It treats water the same as air. If you can get it on your property it is essentially yours. They're buying land, putting in a well-head, getting a cheap permit, and taking it straight out of the groundwater, just like a utility would.

The problem, as I said, is that the law is outdated. But if it was updated we also need to have a real discussion about farm/agriculture usage of water and what they pay/how it is distributed.

By the way in, 2017, 41% of South Florida's Water District's surface & groundwater[0] went to agriculture (1,076 million gallons). Another 41% went to the public utility (1,084 million gallons). Only 4% to industrial/commercial (116 million gallons). But yet we're talking about the 4%, not the 41%. Why is that?

[0] https://www.sfwmd.gov/our-work/water-supply

Did you miss "If our HOA didn't prohibit it, I'd drill a well."? A well wouldn't be treated water from his water company.

You aren't paying for the water, you are paying for the treatment of the water, and the infrastructure to get it to you. Nestle isn't using any of that treatment/infrastructure.

Don't get me wrong, I think bottled water is largely a huge waste (though it does have some uses as well, I don't think the whole industry should disappear). I just don't think this argument (that Nestle gets "free water") is compelling. These deals aren't comparable to tap water pricing, they're probably more comparable to agricultural use, and Nestle's usage is likely a rounding error in comparison (as pointed out by someone elsewhere in this thread).

How anyone spending a few mental cycles can believe the bottled water industry is anything but a rounding error of the agricultural industry is beyond me. But I guess that is the point: Distraction.

You're kidding right? I would expect all drinking water combined to be a rounding error next to agriculture, and bottled water is a subset of that.

In Florida, drinking water [0] uses approximately as much water as agriculture [1]. By far the biggest use of water in Florida is "thermoelectric power" (burning things to generate steam, presumably), which is more than domestic and irrigation combined.

[0] There is no distinction between potable water that is ingested as opposed to used for showering and washing dishes, though.

[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf

How many CCFs of water (748 gallons) are you using? In Seattle the average is 4.3 CCFs a month of water use, and most of your bill isn't for potable water, but sewer.

Watering your lawn is likely $100+ of your bill, green lawns are expensive!

It's not per year. It's a one time fee.

That's actually insane to me. Is the price just the relative cost of getting clean drinking water on the east coast of Florida? I just can't imagine ever paying that much for water. What do you do if you're poor?

> to water a relatively standard size lot

There's a big chunk of the problem.

We really need to start pushing back against "traditional" lawns. In a lot of places you're not just socially but legally required to maintain a completely unsuitable breed of grass in a condition that requires enormous amounts of both labor and water. America spends more water growing lawns than it does on wheat and corn. http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/03/grass-lawns-...

I don't know much about Florida, but it shocks me that there's any need to water a lawn there. Watering a lawn must take up a lot of bottles worth of water!

I wonder if they use more water filling the bottles or landscaping around the bottling plant.

Or just force them to use desalination. Of course, the voters will wait for the aquifer to be destroyed, and THEN pass a law saying water bottling companies can't do that.