By: Ron Hall
“ Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything; scarce anything can be handed in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.” Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith (1723-1790)
How much do you think fresh, clean potable water should cost?
Rarely is that question asked. Instead, when we want to put a monetary value on water we generally start with the question “how much do you pay for water?”
This is a legitimate question since those of us in the landscape industry install and maintain turfgrass and other landscape plants that often need irrigation to stay healthy and attractive. As we’re all now aware, the availability and cost of water figure ever larger into our clients’ landscapes and into the non-governmental and regulatory directives concerning our clients’ use of water.
The answer to the cost of water varies absurdly from region to region, town to town, often community to community.
For example, the family drawing water from a well pays only the cost of drilling the well and the energy required to pump the water to their home or property. Millions of Americans get their water from wells. The rest of us, the great majority of us, receive our water from public or private water purveyors. Some of us have meters and pay according to usage. And some of us don’t have meters and can use all we want and pay a flat rate, which is kind of strange inasmuch you’ll never see our electricity, natural gas or fuel oil suppliers give us that kind of a break.
My household pays $54.25 a month for up to 300 cu. ft. of city-delivered water. Actually, only $24.10 of that amount is for the water. The remaining $30.15 is for sewer. In other words, assuming we use 300 cu. ft. of water (2244 gal.), we are paying essentially a penny a gal. ($24.10 divided by 2240 gal.) to have that water drawn from Lake Erie, treated at our 10-year-old treatment plant and piped to our home. Dividing 2240 by a 30-day month, we discover that we are using approximately 75 gal. a day, well below the national average of approximately 70 gal. per capita for indoor water use and 30% to 40% below per capita use for householders who regularly irrigate their properties.
Examples of how skewed the price of potable water can become are a close as the nearest grocery or fast food restaurant. We can pay 25 cents a gal. at our local grocery, assuming we bring our own gallon jugs. Or, if we complelely lose our sanity, we can buy our water in 12-ounce plastic bottles at $1.50 to $2.00 a pop at local fast-food restaurants, less at the grocery if we buy a case of the plastic bottles.
In other words, we can pay a penny a gallon for the convenience of having water delivered directly to our taps, 25 cents a gal. if we travel to our local grocery or approximately $16 gal. for water in plastic bottles at local fast-food outlets. Of course, if we have to drive a car and get the water, we’re also using gasoline, which adds to water’s cost, financial and environmental.
So, what’s the point of this brief discussion focusing on the price of water?
Water — apart from tallying the costs of accessing, cleaning and distributing it — is almost certainly the most difficult substance in the world to price due to its unequal distribution and availability from region to region, and to complex political and ethical considerations. But those are topics for future columns.
How strange the wildly different monetary values we assign to water, life’s most indespensible commodity and a substance irreplaceable in terms of our health and survival, indeed the survival of all living creatures on earth.
