How saving water costs utilities

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Across the U.S. each month, utilities send meter readers out to record how much water their customers are using. Smart readers can do this virtually, and detect leaks, but many utilities have been slow to adopt the technology. On today's show, we dig into utilities' disincentives to save water.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	NPR.
0:03.6	Stephen, I got your text.
0:13.9	You said this was some kind of emergency.
0:16.3	Yeah, Darien, we got a problem.
0:18.4	And it's a problem wasting one of our most important resources and it's costing Americans
0:23.2	billions of dollars each year.
0:24.9	I'm all ears.
0:25.9	Go ahead, hit me.
0:26.9	Well, the problem that we're talking about is water leaks.
0:30.5	Water leaks.
0:31.5	It's a little anticlimactic, I gotta say.
0:33.7	Well, it shouldn't be.
0:35.4	US homes, they lose nearly a trillion gallons of water each year.
0:39.9	And based on the average price of water, we're talking about something like $5 billion
0:44.3	more than $5 billion down the drain.
0:46.8	All right.
0:47.8	What about per household?
0:48.8	OK, immediately per household that comes out to like 50 bucks, but that's just back
0:53.7	to the napkin mat.
0:55.4	For some families that are going to get hit with something like a four or five figure
0:59.4	water bill.
1:00.4	That is something to be a little worried about.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.