A bottle of water costs your office far more than the price on the label. For fifty employees, the real number is closer to €17,500 a year, once you factor in logistics, storage, and waste.

An office with fifty employees averaging three 330 ml bottles per workday goes through roughly 37,500 plastic bottles a year. The purchase price per bottle looks low, but the real costs run deeper: logistics, storage, waste processing, and reporting. Below: where those costs come from, what they mean for your OPEX, and how to bring them down as a facility manager or office manager.

Why the purchase price is not the real price

The shelf price only tells part of the story. More than 90% of what you pay for a bottle of water goes toward the packaging: production, transport, refrigeration, and disposal. The water itself is a fraction.

For an individual consumer, that barely registers. But at office scale, those costs add up. Every bottle carries a logistics chain: ordering, delivery, storage in the pantry or kitchen, refrigeration, and eventually disposal through waste streams. That chain costs time, space, and money that rarely shows up on a single invoice.

The hidden costs of bottled water for businesses

Bottled water is not just a beverage. It is a procurement stream with operational consequences that facility managers deal with daily.

Procurement and purchasing management. Bottled water requires recurring orders, supplier management, and inventory monitoring. In larger offices this runs through a catering contract, but the margin on bottled water is high and rarely negotiated.

Logistics and storage. Pallets of water take up storage space. Delivery frequency is high because water is heavy and an office goes through it fast. Every delivery costs loading time, elevator capacity, and coordination with the facilities team.

Waste processing and waste management. Empty bottles generate a constant waste stream. Even with proper sorting, the vast majority of PET bottles end up in incineration plants. Waste costs per kilogram rise year over year, and deposit return schemes add administrative complexity.

Hidden facilities burden. Refrigerators for bottled water consume energy. Storage cabinets take up square meters. Cleaning up crates and leakage is a recurring issue. These are small line items, but they stack up over twelve months.

The economic costs of plastic water bottles

According to research by the Pacific Institute, producing a plastic bottle requires three times as much water as actually goes into it [1]. Then there is the energy consumption: PET is made from naphtha, a petroleum derivative. In Europe, raw material costs and energy prices for PET production are structurally high. That makes every bottle more expensive than the retail price suggests.

Transport adds another layer. Water is heavy, and the logistics costs from production facility to distribution center to office are significant. Refrigeration during storage and in the office fridge pushes energy consumption higher still.

What does bottled water cost per employee per year?

For an office with 50 employees, that adds up to €17,500 per year on bottled water, versus €7,200 – €10,000 with a mains-fed water dispenser. That is a saving of €7,500 – €10,500 per year.

The savings are not just in the direct purchase price. It is the facilities hours, the storage space, and the waste stream that make the biggest difference.

Mains-fed dispensers do more than cut costs. Employees choose filtered still, sparkling, or chilled water, plus functional flavors with added vitamins, without adding a single crate to the storage room. Calculate the savings for your office →