4 ms·

This is potable water? Because even $2 sounds insanely good compared to bottled water prices. I know I'm missing a host of things, but it strikes me as not a te

• CydeWeys 10y ago
  It's apples and oranges. Bottled water is orders of magnitude more expensive to ship than tapwater, which just flows through pipes using gravity (plus some occasional pumping). You could water your lawn with thousands of liters of water pretty easily throughout the course of a day, but you aren't going to empty thousands of individual bottles of water onto it in a day. The two are used in such different scales as to not be meaningfully comparable.
  • themartorana 10y ago
    Sure. I understand this, but is there a context in which desal water is ONLY used for drinking water, not for lawns and toilets and whatnot? At that point it maybe becomes a different story? I realize that requires parallel infrastructure possibly (to deliver to the home) but I would think drinking water would be the first use.
    • CydeWeys 10y ago
      Pipes are simultaneously expensive and efficient, to the point where it makes sense to distribute only potable water. It would cost way more to add the infrastructure to pipe gray water everywhere than it does to just use freshwater for household irrigation purposes. Bottled water is so incredibly expensive that it really doesn't matter where the water in it comes from -- the production cost of the water in the bottle itself is insignificant compared to the retail price of that bottle. Besides, it's not like you can water lawns with seawater. When you're at the point where you're having to rely on desalinated water to drink, you're going to need to use it on your lawn as well (if you want to have a lawn).