The Blogs: Water, 33 shekels per liter

File this under “This should be our biggest problem.” And yet…

Bottled water is an environmental disaster: Manufacture the bottle, ship the bottle, fill the bottle, ship the bottle, refrigerate the bottle, drink the water, throw out the empty bottle so it can be shipped to a landfill, or return it for the deposit so it can be shipped to a recycling facility, or maybe to a landfill. Phew.

But it’s also an economic disaster. At my local burger restaurant (motto: “We’re a bar, but there’s no alcohol”), a 330 ml bottle of water costs 11 shekels. So the water costs over 33 shekels per liter. To convert that to imperial units and dollars, just divide by 5280 feet/mile, then trust me that it comes out to about $34 a gallon. Bottled water and soft drinks cost up to five times as much as milk, which requires feeding and caring for cows, or so I have been told.

Nationwide, the price for a 330 ml bottle of water ranges from 5 shekels from a street vendor at a protest on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to 11 shekels at the bar that serves burgers. The retailers sell it for that much because we, apparently, are willing to pay it. I mean, you are, I bring my own water.

Have you ever had a drink of water from a water fountain at your local mall? If there is a water fountain it’s cleverly hidden in a fragrant corner near one of the bathrooms on one of the three floors. And the water is warm. Can it be that the mall owners want to help the food court restaurants sell thousands of shekels of bottled water every day?

Fun fact: the Jerusalem train station has a water fountain. It’s near the toilets and the synagogue

At the Azrielli Hadar Mall management office in Jerusalem I asked where I could find drinking water, and was told – the bathroom. Which bathroom? All of the bathrooms. I checked, and there was definitely water in all of the men’s bathrooms, but no drinking fountain. So I went back and asked if there was a drinking fountain. I was told there wasn’t, so I told the woman behind the desk that a drinking fountain is required by law. She assured me that she would tell her manager. So that’s taken care of.

The law

Yes, there is a law about providing water fountains in public spaces (full text in Hebrew, here). Who’s enforcing that law? Probably the same people who enforce the electric bicycle law and the excessive honking rules.

Here’s an excerpt from the drinking water law (translation by our masters at Google, italics mine).

Obligation to install a drinking facility

2. (a) No person shall open, manage or maintain a public building, whether as owner or otherwise, unless a drinking facility is installed therein.

(b) The drinking facility shall be placed in a central location, visible to the public, and shall be usable during the hours of operation of the public building.

Obligation to serve chilled water

3. Any person who manages or maintains, whether as owner or otherwise, a restaurant, eatery, café or similar place where food is served, shall cause a jug of chilled drinking water to be served to each customer, free of charge.

Buying water you already own

In case you’re wondering, the bottled-water companies get their water from our natural resources, more-or-less for free:

Mei Eden, from wells in an aquifer. The more you buy, the more they pump.
Neviot – same deal, different aquifer.
Ein Gedi – springs in the Ein Gedi Nature Reserve.

So, you’re paying a fortune to buy a natural resource.

Money-saving recommendations

Drink tap water at home. Add a filter or use a filtering pitcher, if you like. At about 8 shekels a cubic meter, including tax, that’s less than an agora* per liter.
Buy and carry an insulated water bottle (Amazon link to bottles that ship free to Israel – full disclosure, I work for Amazon). Add ice and a slice of lime or a cucumber peel. Yum.
Every time you go to a mall, ask where the drinking fountain is, just for fun. If you find one, and it works, and the water is potable, tell your friends.

*An agora is about a quarter of an American cent. It’s such a miniscule amount of money, the coin for it doesn’t exist. Even a five-agora piece is a thing of the past. And yet, Americans continue to mint pennies. It’s not the funniest thing about Americans, but it’s still funny.