Water companies are lying to you
Nothing screams Texas more than having a glass bottle of sparkling water to go with your breakfast tacos.
During SXSW this year I popped over to a hotel where a local radio station was doing quick sets of some pretty top acts as a charity fundraiser. One of their sponsors was one of the five brands of sparkling water that are bottled here in Austin.
The representative who tabled the event told me that their water is cleaner than tap water because it’s just rain. He mimed holding a cup out to catch rainwater.
While true that rainwater doesn’t have surface contaminants picked up from hitting the ground, running off through the car oils and dog poop on its way to the river, it does pick up contaminants from the air. And from wherever it was before it became rain thanks to the water cycle.
I tried to tell him that’s not true, that it has to be touched by humans or it wouldn’t fit our standards in this country. He clearly was not trained enough (or paid enough) to be speaking with a licensed water engineer about how we do water.
It’s easy to hate on bottled water companies after the Nestle documentaries that were popular circa 2012. People’s tap water on fire, fear mongering to inflate a bottled water market, rural family wells drying up with no regulatory support. That’s still happening in some respects.
These days we have luxury water trends from TikTokers in LA. Their reverse osmosis technology isn’t new to our industry, the additives don’t actually hold up to their claims, and the plastic waste is absurd. Underground pipes have their own challenges as we’ve seen lately but they will always be more realistic and more equitable for safe mass consumption.
Fun fact: in the US, bottled water is regulated by the FDA whereas tap water is regulated by the EPA. It may surprise you that the tap water can be held to higher health standards (also here) than the bottled water. But to me they’re kind of just the same… other than some taste factors & plastic issues. PFAs can be found in both and not usually regulated or test in bottled water.
In a study of 1,000 bottles of water, 25% were just tap water and 22% were above state contaminant levels. So I’d recommend to choose what you want to drink armed with information from your local water scientists, rather than information from the “wellness” industry.
WATER ISN’T LOW COST
In my hometown they say that bottled water is a scam since it’s essentially “free from the tap.” While I agree with the sentiment, we should go ahead and debunk the myth of “free” water. In 2023 Black & Veatch had a report surveying 450 utilities where 50% of them said they think people have little understanding of the cost of water.
It really isn’t true that water is free. It’s part of the dangerous narrative surrounding our drinking water. In fact, it’s incredibly expensive and getting more so.
According to the World Health Organization, poor access to drinking water kills 1 million people a year. In 2022, only 73% of people had access to safe drinking water. In some African countries the supply is so intermittent that wealthy families have water storage at home for when the faucets stop running in the afternoons. Yet in the US people become easily outraged at water rate increases. Other utilities are all socially valued higher than our life source resource. Maybe its time to right-size our expectations on the cost of water.
It’s important to note where the demand is coming from - we use drinking water for more than just drinking. I haven’t even began to touch on indirect water use.
Water is 70% consumed by agricultural purposes. Industrial and manufacturing users are also up there with major water use. In the past few years, we are starting to see a trend of data centers also being in the top 10% of major water users. It was uncovered that in The Dalles Google used more than 25% of the town’s water supply. And AI? For every 20-50 ChatGPT questions you ask, it costs us about a bottle of clean drinking water.
The valuation of water is lopsided compared with all other consumer goods. In my state, we have a budget of $37.2 Billion for roads (TXDOT) and could only pay $378 Million from the state water fund. Ouch.
At the consumer level in 2024, the average home water bill in the US is $73 per month. That’s much lower than our average electricity bill ($123) but higher than the internet bill ($64.) And your phone? Expected around $200 per month.
Individual consumers are not paying the full price it costs to process water.
Part of what brings down the cost to consumers is the laws protecting water rate increases. Another part is that like most infrastructure it’s a resource that can share the capital costs among many users (such as an upgrade of the drinking water treatment plant) and where utilities can manage costs over the lifetime of the asset (such as going for debt for capital improvements and then paying back gradually.)
But don’t forget, even in places where people don’t pay water bills (like those who have Irish Water) these costs are being subsidized from somewhere.
All of this is of course subject to change: climate change, digital transformation, new ways of working, a changing regulatory environment. It is all forcing utilities to do more with the same amount of money they’ve always been able to collect from their consumers. In my experience, the utilities are taking on these burdens so that the public does not. We’ve already seen how this has stretched some of them too much when they haven’t been able to adequately protect their people from emerging contaminants, changing out aging lead water pipes, or prevent overflows into waterways. Don’t forget reducing carbon and the circular economy or increasing concerns around cyber security. We’re hearing more of these stories lately because there are more stresses on utilities now.
Big data from your tap
Over the last summer, as we suffered 110F weather, a contractor was sent out to replace all the meters in my neighborhood. It allows the meter to function as an IoT device that uploads my data to the web. Less humanpower is needed to read the devices every month & they can offer services like alerts to customers when there’s abnormal water use (indicating a possible leak.)
Here’s what my portal looks like:
In the sector it’s well known that an average household water use is 60 gpcd (gallons per capita per day.) From these graphs they have estimated how much water is being used for outdoor use vs indoor use… though I’m not exactly sure how they know (other than using big data to guess.) It builds an interesting picture of showing you the data to help you understand better how to curtail your outdoor use.
That’s a problem in a few ways, primarily putting the onus on the individual to conserve water. It also assumes that there is equitable access to addressing leaks on the individual’s side of the water meter.
Likely, you aren’t going to go look at your data. I get it. I had a leak in my utility closet in April and it wasn’t even a blip on my data chart. I got no notification from this new-fangled tech. It’s impossible to tell the difference between a small leak and a car wash day. My neighbors have too much to do to bother with their data portals. And I’m not even sure some of them have internet.
Rest assured, the utility isn’t going to use it to change your water charges even if they could. The whole point of the existing rate schedule is for payers to be charged more for those wanting to pay more for the ability to use more…generally for outdoor use (lawn watering.) So why go through all this trouble to install millions of dollars of new meters? Big data and AI.
Some of the really cool uses are when we can layer AI over the data to understand at the utility-scale if there are leaks out in the system. It’s taking data like my personal data below, all of my neighbor’s similar data, weather data, other event data (like the flushing of a fire hydrant) and hydraulic & geographical data for how the system is set up.
A computer will do a better job at monitoring for deviations across all these parameters than a person. One use case is identifying water loss leaks. Called non-revenue water (NRW) the average amount that leaks is 20% of the produced water but can be anywhere from 5% in higher functioning systems to 70% in inefficient systems. Think of water leaks as the water equivalent to potholes. Consider it for another second — all of the costs and resources involved in treating water and then 20 PERCENT doesn’t make it to consumers? No other industry is randomly missing 20% of their product.
With data we can identify a possible subsurface leak way sooner. Before we had to wait until the leak was large enough that it was visible from aboveground but now we can send out crews sooner.
This reduces the risk of having a massive failure, cascading in more failures in the pressurized hydraulic system. You may have caught the disruption we saw earlier this year in Atlanta.
Obviously, I’m a fan of using the technology to better manage and conserve water. Water utilities are some of the only business models where they both want you buying their product and also not using their product (except maybe gym memberships?)
I think it would be better if utilities could show us the real cost of each gallon and then our actual cost (with the discounts, subsidies, and reduced rates applied to my cart like they do in ecommerce.) That way, we will see the cost of water and still be motivated to fix things like a leaky toilet.
I’m nervous that there are still stakeholders, politicians, and influencers that spend a lot of time talking about public water conservation. This rhetoric unfairly puts the onus on individual citizens to conserve water. In my portal it tells me to “take 5 minute showers” which would curtail water use… but not nearly as much as putting into place measures for manufacturing companies to reduce, reuse (recycle) and find more innovative ways to get water.
The missing part of this equation is the incentives for companies to use less. These same companies that might market their great green policies could very likely be greenwashing their numbers. I’ve seen a major manufacturer not pretreat their effluent, putting the burden on the city to upscale their entire wastewater treatment operations. I’ve seen a major manufacturer fund city gate repairs so they can claim all that saved water leakage as if it were saved in their manufacturing processes. It’s not just bottled water companies that make misleading water claims.
You are part of how we talk about and how we value water. The October campaign, A day without water, draws attention to this. I heard a discussion from a research leg of a European water utility that mentioned that if they let their customers know that there may be a 5 minute water outage, their ratings go up. Before you judge them, think about how eye-opening that is that when people are reminded that they have clean, cheap water, they appreciate it more. You have to have perspective to have gratitude.
So next time you see someone marketing clean, free water from the sky or from your faucet know this - we haven’t had idyllic water for many centuries. People used to drink beer because the water was so unclean. Even water from spring-fed mountains is dangerous to drink. Clean, untouched water is a picture they’ve painted that has never existed in this millennia. Plus, you’re already paying for it to come out of your tap and the environment will love you more for choosing tap water.
Reading: City of Thieves by D Benioff - Uff this one is sort of a dark thriller / quest book. It can be hard to read but it’s also sort of funny?
Listening: The Perfection Trap by D Curran. I like that it both talks about the individual things you can do to the greater cultural problem with how we value meritocracies. Similar, I’d say, to water conservation.
Working: I’ve been curating some water industry views to explain to our non-water executives what the heck utilities are really concerned about.
very cool, thank you