How is water wasted and is it really a problem?
Are you curious about how water is wasted and if it’s actually an issue? When people mention not using a hose to wash your yard or car, is the extra water truly going to waste? Could it be seeping into the ground and adding to the groundwater table, or evaporating into nature and getting recycled? In both scenarios, is the water eventually being filtered enough to be drinkable?
#WaterWaste #Groundwater #Evaporation #WaterConservation
Reasons for Water Waste:
– Excessive use of hoses
– Irrigation systems
– Washing cars and driveways
– Leaky faucets and pipes
Impact of Water Waste:
– Depletion of water sources
– Pollution of groundwater
– Water scarcity in certain regions
By addressing these questions and concerns, we can better understand the importance of conserving water for our future generations. Let’s work together to make a positive impact on our environment!
Wasting water isn’t saying that it’s destroyed. It’s often that it gets converted into a state where it can’t readily be used again.
Like if you leave the tap on when you brush your teeth, the water goes to the waste water treatment plant where it needs to be actively treated to make it not toxic to wherever they release it or treat it more for reuse. If you wash your car excessively, it ends up in the storm drain with all the street drain water, which may or may not be reusable without extensive filtering. If you water your field excessively, most of that water evaporates, where it will condense eventually, but might do so a state or so over where they aren’t short on water.
You’re not so much wasting water, you’re wasting the transportation and filtering it takes to get that water to you, or back to nature responsibly.
You’re not talking about moving lake water to the grass or something like that. You’re talking about wasting treated water. It takes a lot of money and resources to treat water.
Also there’s not a lot of good clean freshwater. Once it’s contaminated it can take many years for it to go through the natural cycle to be drinkable again.
Water will eventually be cycled back into rain water at a certain point but during the inbetween of those stages the total usable water goes down as it will need to be obtained again through rivers or ground water which will take a while before it goes back to 100% what it was before. And certain stuff like watering your lawn and cleaning your car with a hose uses up way more water than it needs to so you are using up the available pool of water which will take a while before it becomes usable again. So if we have a bunch of people using water inefficiently then it could result in drought like conditions for a while you wait for the cycle to refill the available water.
So wasting water is more so not using the amount of water we have access to efficiently which can reduce the available access to that water which the natural cycles can’t quite keep up with.
So, you’re right that on a long enough timescale it’ll even out. But think of it this way – if you had a pound of pure gold, and I took it and threw it into a volcano – no harm done – eventually that gold will find itself in the rock to be mined again. Right?
The water you wash your car with is drinking water. It takes a lot of work to make it drinkable and that water is expensive. Your municipality may only have so much capacity to provide drinking water. And it will make it into the groundwater table, but that can take a decade. Meanwhile, your city needs to pump out even more water, which [can cause problems](https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subsidence-us-levels-1925-and-1977).
So, at a minimum it’s a waste of money, it’s a waste of infrastructure, and it potentially means that your region is using water faster than it can be replenished (true in most of the world).
Your water at your home arrives at some cost, dependent on the difficulty to deliver it. And if you are told not to wash your car, then there is probably a limited supply of water for everyone in your area. Depending where you live, it may be very difficult to recover enough water for every person’s needs.
One doesn’t snap one’s fingers to make water conveniently ready and accessible. Water molecules don’t always flow abundantly to a location you can easily retrieve them when you live in a place where there is worry if everyone will have enough water. 💦 That water will go somewhere, maybe far or maybe not. There might not be enough volume of water for everyone in the first place in your area to sustain life well.
It is kind of an important resource, so best not to waste it when you may need it.
It is a closed loop, some caveman had a drink of water, a couple hours later he took a piss behind the cave.. we are drinking that water.. The problem of wasting water, is the bottling of it, and keeping it cold in fridges.. We have removed so much water from the system, locked up in cold fridges, the planet has to compensate, so melts ice.. That is water waste, stop the bottling of water in fridges…
Aquifers are replenished at some maximal rate. If we draw from them faster than that rate they will dry up. So yes water does get recycled but we can still use up all the available water in an area and run out of it.
This is somewhat location dependent, certainly if you live in a low population density area with lots of rainfall, water conservation may not be that relevant. But in cities or in dry areas it is especially important as they can easily exceed the rate water is replenished in aquifers.
It’s not going back underground, there’s not enough water to penetrate that deep. Most of it is evaporated or runs off.
Run off goes down to the ocean, and eventually it will turn back into clouds, travel inland, and rain down.
The problem is only X amount of water will reach inland, as a function of cloud dynamics, and only (X-Y) amount will be captured as useable water in water tables and reservoirs.
If we use more than X amount of water, the available fresh water will continually get lower and lower until we don’t have enough.
The water that comes out of your tap is clean. The water that comes out of the ground is not, it has to be cleaned before being distributed for people to drink. You aren’t wasting the water but are wasting the cleaning.
Water waste is a very local issue. In some areas you could pretty much use as much as you want with little long-term impact. Chicago draws water from miles out in Lake Michigan and it’s clean enough out there that it doesn’t take too much processing to make it potable. Lake Michigan isn’t going to be running dry anytime soon no matter how much you water a lawn in Chicago. If you draw your water from a private well in an area with a sparse population, a healthy aquifer, and good rainfall, all you need to worry about is drawing the aquifer down below your well pump (growing up in WV, I’ve had the well run dry mid-shower and that’s no fun). If however you live in a heavily populated metropolis in a desert region surrounded by agriculture supported with artificial irrigation, such as much of the western US, they have pumped so much water out of the ground that the ground level is literally falling (like sleeping in a leaking waterbed) and they have to keep drilling the wells deeper and deeper. And they have stolen so much water from the Colorado River that it doesn’t reach the ocean anymore. No matter where you are though, it takes energy to collect, purify, and distribute that water. Saving that energy is a good reason in itself.
when i was 6 or so, I opened all the faucets in the house. Dad was wondering what I was doing. I said I wanted fish to get clean water.
“Like when people don’t wash their hands…” Hahahahaha, not even.
Homie, if you take all “urban” use of water (which includes industrial applications as well as residential use) that combined is 10% of our total water use. 50% is qualified as environmental, which is just water being used to maintain waterways. 40% is agricultural. These numbers are for California, by the way.
Hell it’s estimated that 30% of all water waste is stuff like *leaks.*
You and your use of water is literally irrelevant to the broader water use discussion. Remember that every time they tell you to reduce. You could be raptured tomorrow and it would not affect the result.
It’s more of an issue of WHERE the water is and therefore how convenient/easy it is to get.
If you launched it into space. Any material we launch off into space—steel, aluminum, water—will never return to this planet again with no option to be recycled or repurposed or even contributing to the collective mass of the earth. Just gone. Forever.
In the unlimited water cycle, there is a limited rate at which rain can refill reservoires.
If you use more than that ratio, the reservoires will deplete.
So there’s definitely reason in saving water.
It’s like living on a salary. You get paid once, every month. If you spend more than you get paid every month, you’re in debt. Except nature doesn’t give loans. If the water supply is empty, you have to wait for rain.
I get what you’re saying but the one that always gets me is water shortage. Conserve we are running out of water this many days before we run out of water, etc. when all the water we use for bathing, washing, flushing, watering, drinking all of it is recycled water and has been for a very long time. Recycled with hard chemicals and “cleansing processes”
Now, knowing what sorts of chemicals are seeded into clouds for climate control and then that water goes into our earth to save us from “running out of water” but literally its poisoning our marine life and the entire ecosystem and us, now i kinda don’t want to waste the water.
Here in Belgium, the northern industrious and most populated part of the country has put so much concrete everywhere that rain water doesn’t flow into the ground mostly and doesn’t reach groundwater tables.
The water goes into sewers, draining pipes and then rivers.
It’s been raining here for SEVEN CONTINUOUS MONTHS and they still fear drought in summer.
It is wasted
Moving water from somewhere you can drink it – like a reservoir – and using a hose to flush it down the drain to somewhere you can’t drink it – like the ocean – is what wastes it. Sure, there same amount of water exists. But that’s poor solace to a thirsty man with an empty reservoir.
You’re not wasting the water itself (as in it being ruined forever or destroyed), but the effort that went into getting that water and/or the opportunity to use the water for something else.
* Money, effort, and other resources are used to get the water there. Your utility payments, workers’ hours, and equipment/property/fuel/electricity were all used to get the water there. Now that it’s down the drain, to get the same (amount of) water back, a similar amount of money, effort, and other resources have to be spent on the replacement water.
* A gallon that simply goes down the drain is a gallon that hasn’t been used for cooking, cleaning, watering plants, etc.
* If you’re in a drought or otherwise limited in capacity, it can harm other efforts (firefighting, etc.).
Besides a lot of the other answers which include valid points like treatment efforts etc. in that you’re wasting potable water by just letting it flow out of the system, there’s also the consideration of the capacity of a city’s water supply.
In some places that experience drought, in certain seasons the amount of water available to a large number of people can be very limited and a lot of effort goes into making sure there’s enough for at least the basics.
When the dams are running low, having a half million households pour hundreds of litres down the drain to wash cars and such every weekend could actually end with no drinking water being available.
It’s wasting because most of time, it will go in the sewer until it get filtrated and clean up which is a slower process than directly consuming it. The waste is not about water itself but the whole cost of the process and the resources needed for it