The Real Cost of Your Bottled Water Habit

Pick up a bottle of water at a kiosk, a vending machine, or the supermarket checkout, and it barely registers as a cost. A euro here, a euro fifty there. That's the trick of it — it's never one big bill, just a long string of small ones.

So let's actually add it up.

What the habit adds up to

Across the EU, people drink an estimated 120 litres of bottled water per person per year on average — and in the heaviest-consuming markets it's far higher: around 200 litres per person in Italy, 168 in Germany.

That's not an occasional purchase. That's a standing monthly expense most households have never actually written down, because it never arrives as a single invoice — just a receipt here, a receipt there, forgotten by the time the next one is printed.

Use the calculator alongside this article to see what your own habit actually costs over a year — and what the same spending looks like with filtered tap water instead.

The cost isn't only financial

Every one of those bottles is manufactured, filled, shipped, refrigerated, sold, and — at best — recycled once. The EU's own Single-Use Plastics Directive exists specifically because beverage bottles are one of the most common items found on European beaches and in European waterways. Reducing that waste isn't a side benefit of switching to filtered tap water — it's the most direct lever most households have.

Where the price actually comes from

Very little of what you pay for a bottle of water is the water itself. It's the bottle, the label, the cap, the transport, the refrigeration, and the retail markup — all stacked on top of something that, in most of Europe, already arrives at your tap for a fraction of a cent per litre.

That's the gap a filter is actually closing: not the cost of water, but the cost of packaging and moving it.

A switch that pays for itself

The PJURE under-sink filter reduces chlorine, PFAS and other contaminants while keeping the calcium and magnesium in — so the water tastes like something you'd actually choose to drink straight from the tap, without the case of bottles in the hallway.

The system starts at €159 (or €139 on subscription), and the replacement filter — good for a year — is €49, or €39/year on subscription. For most households currently buying bottled water regularly, that's a cost the habit itself covers within the first few months, with every year after effectively a fraction of what bottled water was costing.

Curious exactly how the filtration works? See it layer by layer, or browse the full research in our Water Knowledge library.