What To Buy With $1.45 … Besides That Bottle Of Water

It’s sort of like The Incredible Journey, only instead of cats and dogs, it’s starring … water!

Here’s the deal. Water has to travel a long way before it reaches your faucet, and it can pick up heavy metals — yep, even lead — as well as agricultural pesticides, industrial pollutants, and pharmaceuticals. Gross, right? No one wants a heaping glass of that with breakfast.

Some people turn to bottled water to stay away from the nastiness, but that adds up quickly. The average price for a bottle of water in the US is $1.45.
It sounds astronomical when you consider that it only costs about a penny for an 8-oz glass of water that’s been filtered by PUR— that faucet filtration system that reduces 10 times more chemical contaminants than Brita’s® leading pitcher filter¹.

You’d have to drink 145 glasses of PUR-filtered water to hit the cost of a single bottle of water — and you’d probably have to sprint to the bathroom about 73 times, so we don’t recommend it.

“But it’s just $1.45,” one might claim. And yes, there is likely that much in change under my sofa cushions, but here are 10 ways we’d much rather spend $1.45 than on a single bottle of water …

1. A taco from a taco truck on the side of the road. (Unreasonably delicious, I promise you.)
2. A package of 12 self-adhesive fake mustaches.
3. A pack of gum.
4. About 100 shares of a penny stock.
5. A greeting card at the dollar store. Make somebody smile!
6. A paperback book at a thrift shop.
7. A bottle of shampoo. If you have short hair, it could last you six months.
8. Five 4×6 photo prints.
9. Two eight-packs of No. 2 pencils.
10. Twenty-nine cups of lemonade from a kid’s sidewalk stand, assuming they’re charging a nickel per cup — which is totally reasonable because I bet they didn’t wash their hands first.

But wait! What if you’re buying a bottle of water every day at work, or every evening at the gym?

Think about how that adds up over time — not to mention, uh, the crazy amount of empty plastic bottles you’d be creating …

• Buying a bottle every workday on your lunch break? That $7.25 could buy a cute reusable tote bag instead
• A full week’s worth of water bottles? $10.15! Get a cup of coffee with a friend and split a delicious scone.
• Two weeks of water bottles are more than 20 dollars. That’s the cost of a new T-shirt or two or a new hardcover book to read this weekend.
• If you buy one bottle of water every day for a month, you’re spending $43.50 that could have been used for a stainless steel bento box for your lunch. C’mon, how cool are those star-shaped sandwiches?
• Six months’ worth of water bottles adds up to a staggering $264.63. That’s about the price of a really cozy organic cotton duvet. Or tickets to a show on Broadway. Or a couple of amazing massages.
• Ready for the heavy-hitter? A year’s worth of bottled water for a single person will set you back just under $530. That’s a weekend away at a semi-local bed & breakfast.

By switching to PUR water filtration from bottled water, a family of four can save as much as $1,000 per year, as well as prevent hundreds of plastic bottles from being discarded.

You get freshly-filtered, crisp-tasting water for approximately $0.01 per glass, and the rest of the remaining $1.44 is yours to spend on anything you’d like … but hopefully tacos. Con carne asada, por favor.

PUR’s Mineral Core™ technology reduces lead and other chemical and physical contaminants for a cleaner, great-tasting water, so you can drink more and stay hydrated.

¹Versus best-selling Brita® pitcher filter OB03. Brita® is a trademark of Brita LP.