Eli5 Conserving Water

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I understand conserving water in areas of drought.

But what about places that have heavy rains and a healthy water table. Why do we have to conserve water? Can’t we use as much as we want and then it will evaporate, come down as rain, and get used again??

I get that it takes more energy to treat the water but like that’s show biz baby we all use water. It makes more sense to conserve energy in other ways.

In: Earth Science

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Likely you can. I live next to the Great Lakes. I could fill my pool every single day and nothing bad would really happen. It’s just hard to send a message to the population that everyone on the West coast needs to conserve water but Michigan and Ohio just go nuts.

Anonymous 0 Comments

You are right that water conservation does not make sense in all places. However it does play an impact in most places. Even if you have a lot of clean water around we do invest heavily in infrastructure to guarantee it is clean and pump it through pipes to get it to where we want it, and then clean transport it away after it have been wasted and clean it so we can release it. All of this infrastructure takes power and resources to run and does have a limited lifetime before it have to be replaced. The more water you use the more it cost to maintain the infrastructure needed.