Nearly all toilets in Hong Kong use sea water.
I can think of another reason; to have a tank full of potable water in an emergency, such as when the municiple water supply is damaged from a disaster. Expecially if it’s a disaster with little or no warning to allow folks to stock up on bottled water first, like an earthquake or tsunami.
It might be argued, though, that it’s more likely that people will die from the eventual lack of potable water in general than from lacking an emergency source of water in disaster situation. My wag is that it would probably still be worth going non-potable on the toilets.
I read somewhere that people who drink bottled water contribute to water depletion because they should be drinking tap water. Does anyone know a link to this? How would this be the case?
It is ridiculous that those in western countries are drinking bottled water when they have the safest tap water, while in the 3rd world they have to drink water which causes disease. They cannot afford bottled water.
Car washing needs an enormous amount of water. Think of the millions of cars…
I found a link but not the one I was looking for
http://www.foodcomm.org.uk/latest_water_Oct04.htm
Always shower in pairs.
Note: this has additional benefits.
You must wash up really slowly then. By the time I’ve finished washing up, my clean-but-unrinsed dishes are still wet. I pile them up in the little second sink I have (though I realise not everyone has this luxury) then give them all a blast with the water, then stack them to dry. Besides, even if the soap does dry a little, it’s water soluble.
Anyway, this is becoming a real issue in the UK - we’re currently experiencing the worst drought in the south of England for thirty years. They’ve imposed a hosepipe ban in Kent, and are talking about imposing water meters on houses - something I think is vitally necessary to the environment, despite the socialists’ complaints. I’m going to put a brick in my toilet cistern.
Lots of things would work with supercritical CO2, but I’m not sure how to install them in the house. It’d be like having a household autoclave instead of a dishwasher.
Just about everyone that lives on less than 40 acres in the Colorado Rockies, that has a well has no rights to their own water.
Yep.
Inside use only. Meaning, you are not legally able to pay for electricity to pump water out of your well from under your ground to wash your car or water outside plants.
While the folks in Denver, that soak up our water like a sponge continue to plant blue grass and water their driveways.
The people in Denver are welcome to waste the water under my property, but I don’t even have the right to have a sill cock/spigot on the outside of my house so I can wash my car.
Heh. Watch me. If there was ever a place for a ‘give them the bird’ smiley, this would be it.
No cite, but I can’t imagine how “drink[ing] bottled water contribute[s] to water depletion”; despite the millions of gallons of water stored and consumed every day, bottled water is (figuratively speaking) a drop in the bucket of total municipal water supplies, and isn’t even comperable to the amount of water used in agriculture.
Western countries do not necessarily have “the safest tap water”, as the cryptosporidium outbreak in Milwaukee illustrates, municipal water supplies can and do become contaminated, and most municipal filtration systems date back to WWII or earlier. People with compromised immune systems are regularly advised to drink only filtered water or purified bottled water (shades of Dr. Strangelove there). The situation is even more problematic in some European nations–hence, why bottled water is so common there–and any traveller to ventures to Central/South America, Asia, or Africa is strongly advised to carry a portable water filter or treatment system and/or drink bottled water.
It is a terrible shame, though, that one of the largest health problems in Third World nations is water contamination. Communual filtration systems, along with innoculation, is a very inexpensive way to improve the quality of life in those areas. Unfortunately, the NGO approach has been to provide they same time of water processing technology–that is to say, centralized water treatment stations requiring infrastracture and much power–instead of portable water purification systems, which is essentially useless for the lifestyle enjoyed by those cultures.
We (the Western world) take potable water for granted; you turn on the tap, or open the cooler at the Quik-E-Mart, and there it is, clean, fresh, and ready to drink. This isn’t the usual experience for most of the world’s population, and yet most people in developed nations–even those that worry about famine and disease–scarcely give it a thought. The whole topic of water purification–municipal, Third World, and otherwise–probably deserves a Staff Report or a few.
Stranger
So I’m curious: how does this work? Is the water yours and you’re legally prohibited from using it? Or is the water not considered part of your property in Colorado law (in which case, I guess the water’s not yours in the first place)?
Why does it matter how much land you have?
Don’t know about this one. It’s basically nothing more than a glorified dehumidifier, and the one I run all summer makes a noticeable difference in my electric bill. And it won’t work worth a darn in the winter when the relative humidity is very low. And the claims of $0.05/liter being economical is only true when you compare it with bottled water or soda. A back of the envelope guess is that it’s still 10-20 times as expensive as the stuff that comes out of my tap.
Using energy (an increasingly scarce resource) to generate water (a renewing resource) seems like a bad idea.
I’m a little confused by this - you don’t already have water meters? Don’t you pay for water by how much you use? Or are you talking about something else?
Cucking-stools.
Like the air you are breathing, water is a renewable resource. The troubles occurs because of pollution and industrialization(both manufacturing and horticultural) which take the available water of of the normal cycle. The water problems in Africa cannot be solved in the US by you not flushing the toilet when you pee.
In the UK, most households pay a flat rate per annum to the local water company, based on where you live, and the size of the property you live in. If you don’t use much water, then it can be more economical to have a meter installed voluntarily, but it isn’t required. Businesses, as far as I know, have to have a water meter.
I’m not exactly sure how it does work, but the bottom line is most of us in the mountains only have the right to use water in the house. Even outdoor hot tubs are a no no.
As you can imagine, many people either don’t know this, or just ignore it.
In the county where I work, they are trying to set up something wherein you can buy those rights (see the linked article below).
Most people with large tracts (typically 40 acres) have more rights so they can water horses and such.
Maybe I shouldn’t have ranted about something I don’t know that much about, but It drives me a bit crazy to see people planting blue grass in what is basicaly a ** freaking DESERT** (the Colorado front range), then have folks tell me I can’t use the water under my property, that I pay to pump out of the ground to have an outdoor hot tub or wash my car.
What also get’s me po’ed is that the talk about it being a finite resouce, and everyone must share, and they are only looking out for the greater good. BUT if you want to buy it? Sure, no problem. Bunch of jackels.
HereIs a pretty good article from the local paper.
It is true in the purest sense. My town, like many in Massachusetts, uses reservoirs (large ponds that are protected for public water use). That water mainly gets cycled over and over. Most of them are never in danger of running low on water.
I understand your point from an ecological standpoint but the fact remains that the vast majority of the water that is used is still there in the same area in some form. Large underground wells may suffer from overuse but what about areas that have plenty of water and get theirs from abundant lakes and rivers?
Like food, it is a distribution problem and me turning off the water while I shave only takes some tiny burden off of the local water treatment plant. It does nothing to help the global fresh water supply.
The public rest room on route 495 in Massachusetts up near Lowell used to have waterless toilet systems that used some dark recirculating flyuid. It looked black. I suspect that it freaked a lot of people out, because the toilets there are now normal water-using toilets. Maybe people were afraid of black recycled God-knows-what liquid splashing up on their privates, possibly carrying other people’s cooties.
The worst water waste I ever saw was the vast artifical lakes in Las Vegas – the huge lake and animated fountain at the Bellagio, or the artifical lake with the regularly schweduled Naval Battle down the Strip. All that evaporation area of fresh water out in the water-starved Nevada Desert.
Then you go back to your room and the signs in the bathroom caution you about Not Wasting Water. Vegas is a surreal town.
Well, you learn something new every day. Here, everybody pays for what they use. You water your grass all summer, you pay for it. However, sometimes in droughts there are still water restrictions - sometimes people on one side of the street are allowed to water on even days and the other side on odd, for example. It’s never happened here, although we’ve basically had a drought on for the past ten years, but I hear about it a lot out west. Personally I don’t water my lawn - why would I, I’d just have to cut it! I water my plants with a drip irrigation system.