The “water being moved around by nature through snow melt, evaporation, and rivers” is a critical process in ecosystems, and also purifies and filters the water. Not that we could sequester enough even on an industrial scale to interfere with the global hydrosphere, but we wouldn’t want to do it if we could. Conservation of water, including drip irrigation and preventing evaporation during irrigation transport are important steps but trying to make a completely closed hydrologic cycle within an agricultural system would be prohibitively expense if it were even feasible to do so. People have tried to develop that capability for space exploration and extra-planetary habitation for decades and it still isn’t mature enough to be reliable even on a scale to support a small crew of astronauts.
Exploring this a bit more - I know there is an “ick” factor to recycled water from urban uses, but could it be economical at scale for a large city? I believe treated water is released back to nature in rivers already, but taking the extra steps, whatever they are, to make the used water potable again in the same city - has that already been done?
There’s a fair amount of water reclamation and re-use, particularly in California. It’s easier (less treatment) to have it go to non-potable water, though, for agriculture or industry. But a fair amount does go to potable water, too.
“Toilet to Tap” is already a thing in parts of Southern California. Despite the nickname, it is the safest water in the country and the citizenry hasn’t made much of a fuss about it.
Turning wastewater into a tourist attraction is the purpose of Arizona’s monument to evaporation:
The final stage of the town’s sewage treatment system. Described by the town’s official website of being in the center of a “29-acre 100 million gallon effluent lake.”
As one might expect, the phrase wasn’t invented by supporters:
December 12, 1993: The intro of an in-depth LA Times story notes critics of the Upper District’s project have started calling it a “ ‘toilet-to-tap’ folly .” This is the first ever use of the phrase in a major newspaper.
“Toilet to Tap is negative. A new phrase that instills confidence in the water’s purity, for example “engineered to zero water”, or highlights the process, such as “naturally reclaimed water,” should be put into use,” Audrey told us.
But screw that. Embrace “toilet-to-tap,” and ruthlessly mock people who use it as a negative. Accuse them of being anti-science and not understanding even high school chemistry.
The ones by Lake Erie, like on Put-In-Bay island, do well with white German varieties like Riesling. The Lonz winery there made an old-country style wine garden there and it works well within its Teutonic context. But hot-blooded red Mediterranean varieties would be out of luck there.
This. Speaking as someone who lives in South Texas, our water comes from two local lakes. It’s been a wetter year than usual for us, and although that may be a one time thing, I suspect that this may be our new pattern. No need for us to build a pipeline from the Great Lakes.
Yeah, and since everyone will be driving electric cars in a few years, not buying gasoline as much, the existing fuel pipelines networking out from the refineries in your area can start shipping water instead? Amiright?
I’m guessing not. Wetter than usual for us means not having to worry about building a desalination plant, not having extra to export. Even so, our city manager is still working on getting a desalination plant approved for industrial use. I don’t know why the steel plants and other industrial stuff they’re planning on building require fresh water, but that’s where we’re at.
Most of the water used in steel production is for cooling, and wastewater and seawater work fine for that, but water used for descaling, waterjet cutting, dust removal, et cetera has to be free of salt and other impurities. The same is true for many industrial applications like microchip manufacturing, which uses phenomenal amounts of freshwater.
Doesn’t have to be the case, though. Intel at least claims to be targeting 100% water reclamation at their fabs by 2025. They claimed to be at 80% already in 2018.
Yeah, a lot of water in industrial use can be reclaimed, and it frankly isn’t even all that expensive in the overall scope of things; if the true cost of fresh water were included in the cost, it actually probably makes financial sense to purify and reuse water, but when industrial users (who use vastly more water and often either don’t return it directly downstream or what is returned is highly contaminated with pollutants downstream) pay the same as the residential user pays at the tap, those costs aren’t realized by the users.
