One day Gregor was walking in Beirut. He was thirsty, and decided to buy a bottle of water. He went inside a small shop and asked for a small Sohat bottle. The shop vendor gave him a blue plastic transparent bottle, in exchange, Gregor gave him 500 Lebanese Liras. On the Bottle, Gregor saw that it contained 500 ml.
What exactly is 500 ml? Gregor wondered... While he was walking, he passed by an old lady carrying big bottles of water. Those were the 2 liter ones. He had a thought.
"Excuse me, dear lady, how much did one of your bottles cost?"
"One thousand Lebanese Liras, my son."
That was stupid, thought Gregor, my bottle should be worth half its price!
The water in my bottle is a quarter of her bottle in Volume, yet it costs half.
What am I paying for then?
A big truck passes in front of him, carrying many empty plastic water gallons.
He remembers discovering that one of those contains 19 Liters. And only 5,000 Liras for it. How many small bottles could you buy with that? But how many could you fill, instead?
He decides to search for the value of his neighborhood in water.
On his right, he sees a roof terrace, and an old man watering his plants. The plants are grown in big blue plastic barrels. Some are empty though...
"Excuse me, sir, How much water can this barrel contain?"
"About 50 Liters, son"
"Wow! So if you caught the water from the rain in this barrel, you could probably fill hundreds of Sohat Bottles."
"True. This big tank here can contain 1000 liters, son, it is piped from the municipality, and I bet it would fill thousands of small Sohat bottles" the old man says.
"And how much do you pay for all this water then?"
"250,000 Liras a year"
"That's nothing! Has water no value?"
"Well, what you pay for when you buy a bottle is the process, the materials, the container that is holding your water, the journey your container goes through, to reach you. What if your rooftop became a container, or the ground, or the whole city?"
"Then the value of the volume of thousands of small bottles will disappear" Gregor said.
"The city can be worth millions of small water bottles, but we don't have to pay their price."
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