I haven’t been able to find figures on the efficiency. Is 95%, 90% recovered? 80%? I know some evaporates while it sits in those filtering pools. But, even evaporated water eventually returns as rain.
How guilty should we really feel for running the tap for 45 seconds while we brush our teeth? Or fill a tub for a bath?
Most wastewater goes right into the ocean. It doesn’t get recycled into drinking water. Even if it did, it’s still more costly to clean wastewater than to not use it in the first place.
The more water that’s used, the bigger the entire water treatment system needs to be. This includes sewer capacity (already at the limit in many locations) and treatment plant capacity.
In many locations (mine, for instance), water is being used faster than it’s being replenished. Soon, mandatory water restrictions will be necessary. Even non-desert areas (like Atlanta) have had sever droughts recently.
Why do you leave the water running? Are you just lazy?
Shaving requires running water every few strokes to flush out the razor. Otherwise the blade clogs and the razor doesn’t work. I’ve tried sloshing it around in the sink. Water pressure is the only thing that clears the clogged hair around the blade.
Turning the tap on/off repeatedly every few seconds is a pain. It’s my understanding nearly all waste water is treated and reused. They couldn’t dump the water because we have no ocean here.
If there is a huge loss of water maybe we all need to share the same tub water? Five people could share the same water in one night. That’s how it was done when people drew well water in buckets. My granddad told those stories.
That’s pretty gross. Especially if you’re the 5th person to use the bath water.
The American heartland. That huge area between the Atlantic and Pacific.
I guess the water treatment varies from region to region. We have a pretty big treatment plant in my city. I’ve read articles in the local paper about it.
I’d bet real money that your wastewater is not being turned into drinking water. It may be used for crop irrigation or for watering golf courses, but it’s not coming out of your tap. So please don’t use that as a rationalization for wasting drinking water.
Unless you have a plasma incinerator connected to the sewage you can’t waste water. It’s 100% recyclable. However you can waste resources used to pump and clean it and you can also use more water than the water table will replenish. In my area we have a substantial aquifer so supply is not really a concern. It is so plentiful that we run river fountains from underground water.
This arguments always wind up in the throes of the fallacy of the excluded middle. If you aren’t using bathwater for five people then it isn’t worth saving water.
Baloney. Every household could easily save a few gallons every week just by turning off the tap when you don’t need the flow. Ten gallons a week is a minimal number, equal to turning off a shower a couple of minutes early. 100,000,000 households times 10 gallons per week times 52 weeks a year equal 52,000,000,000 gallons. That’s enough to satisfy all of Chicago for a month.
A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real water.
I see no fallacy involved. If I don’t value it, I don’t value it. The fallacy I see is the idea of “what if everybody did that?” What I do has nothing to do with what everyone else does. So there’s no logical reason for letting what other people do affect my actions.
When there actually is a shortage, then we as a society can get together and add regulations. Until we do, I see no reason to adhere to ones that don’t exist. As far as the environment is concerned, the water that runs down the drain is still water.
I honestly only see it as a way for the cultural elite to have something to look down at other people for. And I resist that type of pressure.
Most of our wastewater from here eventually goes down a big river (the Mississippi, you may have heard of it) and ends up in the Caribbean, a part of the Atlantic Ocean. So even if that ocean isn’t ‘near’ you, it’s where the water ends up. There it mixes with the ocean water, becomes salt water, and is not suitable for drinking, raising crops, etc.without expensive treatment.
And the lake is also where we get drinking water, so it’s at least better than those situations like desert communities draining aquifers and the like. I don’t advocate waste of water but around here, we’re at least a bit ahead of some other places in terms of supply.
I wrote job descriptions for an effectively new (completely re-built) waste water treatment facility in St. Petersburg. IIRC, that facility reclaimed ~ 15% of waste water. That water was NOT potable but it was suitable for irrigation and that’s where it went. The balance of that water, after cleaning, went back to nature via creeks and into the bay.
Learning how that plant operated was one of the more interesting jobs I’ve ever had. There is a lot more involved to reclaiming waste water than one might realize. The city and/or county had to pay to have processed excrement trucked away; IIRC, the waste was spread on pasture land as fertilizer.
I generally don’t sweat my household water use much. That’s not to say I’m against water saving measures like low-flow toilets, yard irrigation restrictions, etc…
The reason I don’t usually worry about it is because far more water goes into watering lawns and into agricultural use and industry around here, than is remotely used by people leaving the faucet running while they brush their teeth or shave.
I water my lawn and garden responsibly, so I don’t sweat the rest (1 hr, once a week, very early morning for the lawn, and 45 minutes every other day for the garden’s drip system).
The waste is compounded when the water you run is hot water. Basically what you are wasting is energy, whether it is the energy used to treat the water or the energy used to bring you the water from wherever you get potable water. Saving that energy may not affect you. You may not mind paying a few bucks more on your water / sewage / heating bill (or someone else may be paying that bill), but your waste will drive up the price and people on the fringes will suffer.
Developing frugal habits regarding water and energy in general is for the common good. There may come a time when we can be profligate with these things, but that time is not now.
A number of aquifers are at risk all over the world.
Wasting this type of water is just one example of how you can ‘waste’ water.
For example, in the Midwest USA, there is one large aquifer and numerous other smaller ones that have been severely lowered by development and overuse. Millions get their water from these aquifers, and many millions more are fed by crops watered via these aquifers. Would be a terrible blow to civilization for them to run dry. Doesn’t matter if that terrible blow works into the definition of ‘wasting water’ in the geological/atmospheric sense.
Maybe ‘waste’ isn’t a good term when you misuse water. If you have ten gallons of water and you wash your car and clean the sinks with it, one could argue whether the earth considers it wasted (funny, I know), but if you need that 10 gallons to water crops that would feed your family, I’m betting your families definition of waste would differ greatly than ‘mother nature’.
This is about what humans would consider waste, not some non-conscious eco-process. There is no waste in nature. Whatever result is what it is. To humans, you are wasting water.