The suit's plaintiffs are seeking to ban Nestlé from advertising its products as spring water and unspecified monetary damages for the difference between the cost of tap water and a bottle or jug of bottled water from Poland Spring.
They are paying from 300 to 3,000 times more than the cost of tap water without any benefit.
With public tap-water prices ranging from a low of $3.73 per 1,000 gallons in Chicago to a high of $23.42 in Atlanta, the cost of tap water has often been subsidized, another water expert said.
Although government action has unblocked the commercial-paper market, an important source of short-term funding, the cost of tapping it remains very high for all but the healthiest of issuers.Faced with all this, some companies such as Marriott International, an American hotel group, have drawn down bank credit lines, even though they did not need the money urgently.
As the study notes, the cost of tapping new supplies and repairing old infrastructure would bear down on the country's 54,000 utilities just when consumers, squeezed by a weak economy and high unemployment, were already balking at significant rate increases to cover payments to bond investors.
Bsikri thinks the estimated $90 billion cost of tapping the country's shale gas reserves would be better spent on developing alternative sources of energy.
Ms. Zarghami declined to say how much the company was investing, but said it was small compared with the costs of tapping into "the muscle of the marketing machine".
While still a bargain by comparison to bottled waters, the cost of New York City tap water, long considered one of the best public supplies in the world, has risen rapidly in recent years, and the city is considering a 14percentt rate increase for next year.
Labour's concern with the cost of living taps into a much wider debate about the state and shape of Britain's economy, and whether it can deliver for working people.
BP and its partners, Shell, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips, are already producing oil from one platform and are building larger ones at a cost of $7 billion to tap more oil to the northwest at a location known as Clair Ridge, which is scheduled to begin production in 2016.
"Two thousand liters of tap water cost less than one liter of Spa," a popular Dutch mineral water, Mr. Liauw said.
