"Water it is", you might just find it on eBay

Creating an efficient marketplace where buyers and sellers had equal access to information and opportunities was part of Pierre Omidyar's original vision for eBay. Almost 11 years later, the number of categories in which eBay continues to provide an efficient marketplace for both buyers and sellers is mind-boggling. I used to be fond of telling anyone that cared to listen that eBay was the place to find anything, "from collectibles to cars." But this alliterative attempt at a catchall phrase doesn't even begin to cover some of the unexpected items that have found a flourishing market on eBay. Modular, pre-fab buildings, for example. With 484 items when I wrote this post, this category is as far removed as possible from the image of eBay as a place to buy and sell collectibles or something you found in your garage and were about to throw away.

Now an Australian economist has come up with the idea of selling another unusual item on eBay. Oh, it's just something that covers two-thirds of the planet and yet is still scarce in may parts of the world -- water. Mike Young of the Wentworth Group in Australia suggests that trading good old H2O on eBay has tremendous potential to improve water usage efficiency. Professor Young feels that once there's a market price, opportunities for innovation will present themselves. To quote the article in Australian IT where I read it:

Professor Young said households could be given a set allocation of water for washing, cleaning and garden use, and then those who cut consumption would be able to sell off their surplus to others, such as pool owners, who needed more.

He said the simplest way of doing this would be to "put them up for sale on eBay", and to protect a minimum level of water for each house so that low-income households could not be exploited by selling off all their water for fast cash.

But don't rush off just yet to fill a bucket or two at the kitchen sink or list snowballs on eBay (wait, that's been done before!). The Australian Water Services Association believes that the cost of such a scheme at the household level would make it prohibitive. What a pity. Part of me was looking forward to the day when eBay can "tap" into the water market and I could make more people groan with my homage to eBay's famous advertising line "Whatever it is, you'll find it on eBay."  (See the atrocious title of this blog post).

Encouragingly, the same article says that water utilities are already discussing similar concepts -- but for big industrial users, not for households -- in some of the driest regional areas across Australia.

If you have some ideas on markets that could become more efficient by trading on eBay, why not post them on the Chatter Blog discussion board? It would be interesting to get some discussion going.