This probably comes off as a stupid question, but what better place?
I know to turn off the faucet when brushing teeth. I know to take short showers. I know that we need to conserve water.
I just don’t know why. If the faucet is running water, doesn’t the water return to the earth? I realize the need for water treatment, but is that the only reason I shouldn’t water my lawn 6 days a week (btw, I live in the Rocky Mountains)?
I’m all for making the world a better place, so I’ll happily go along with all the water conservation, but I just want to know why I’m doing it. Water doesn’t leave the earth, or even my region, because I flushed one too many times. It’s not like it evaporates into space.
Again, I realize how dumb this is, but I guess I just don’t completely understand the whole process.
What about the non-potable water that I use to water my lawn? I’m told not to water more that 3 times a week, and to limit the length of waterings. That water is going straight back to the soil.
There’s plenty of water on Earth.
What’s in short supply is drinkable water - clean water that is available in lakes or underground, that can be used without a significant amount of processing. Once you use water, it generally ends up in the “undrinkable” category.
In the arid West, the available water supply is already oversubscribed. The fact that the water you use doesn’t disappear doesn’t mean that it’s immediately available for re-use.
AFAIK, most lawns are watered from the same water that feeds into the house. This is true even for those custom sprinkler systems.
That water is still potable.
Are you getting municipal water that’s untreated? That’s got to be some kind of health/safety violation.
Oh, and in many places, watering restrictions are not enforced if the water is supplied from your own property and doesn’t pass through the municipal systems. For example, if you have a water well on the property.
One of the issues – even if you do have your own well – is that the aquifer you’re pulling water from isn’t the same one your property drains into. In the Rockies, you need to think about whether the people downhill from us will still have water if you use a lot.
This comes up in irrigation, too. There are rivers around here that actually run dry in drought years because the upstream folks pump massive amounts of water out of them to irrigate their crops. The water that soaks into the soil doesn’t find its way back to the river, so the downstream people get screwed.
Only part of the water goes back into the soil - a fraction evaporates (in the semi-arid Rockies, a relatively large fraction), and a fraction is taken up by the grass and incorporated into the organic matter.
In the Rockies, your water comes more often from reservoirs rather than groundwater pumping. Those reservoirs are formed by damming rivers, and downstream users depend on the water released from those reservoirs. When you consume water (as opposed to merely using it), the water that you consume is then unavailable for those downstream users.
What hasn’t been mentioned here is that the main consumer of water, especially in the west, is agriculture. Not only do those irrigators consume a large portion of the water they extract, but the water that they return to the system is more saline than the water they extracted. The irrigated crops take up water, but not dissolved salts; in the return flows, the salts contained in the total volume extracted are concentrated into the smaller returned volume. Ultimately, agriculture is where water conservation practices need to be focused. While efforts by residents and users of municipal water supplies are laudable, they have a relatively small effect on the overall water supply. Conservation efforts on the part of agricultural producers have a much greater impact.