Is it more of a water bill thing, or do you actually effect the water supply? (Long showers, dishwashers, etc)
In: 2176
You aren’t wasting water. You’re wasting clean usable water. Not the same thing.
Imagine that you have a tank of clean water on your roof supplying your household needs. Now take the water from your shower drain and put it into your roof tank. Most people would not be comfortable drinking from their tap any more, certainly not after a few weeks’ worth of showers.
But it’s worse than that. Imagine a very simple system where a small country has a single reservoir that fills from a mountain stream. Some of the water is left in the stream for the fish, some goes to farms, some goes to factories, some goes to people’s houses, some leaks into the ground or evaporates from the reservoir itself. Anything that is used ends up on the ocean eventually. There is only so much water coming into the reservoir every year, everyone thinks their needs deserve a bigger share of the stream’s water.
(It’s getting beyond ELI5, but it’s worth noting that water clean enough for one use may not be clean enough for another, purifying drinking water may not be cheap, and also that historically farms, which use the majority of water, have been encouraged to do some rather counterintuitive things, like growing water-intemsivr cattle feed for the export market in the middle of a desert. In some countries, but not the US, there is a distinction between water for drinking and water for other household use — there is no real need to use purified drinking water to flush toilets or water lawns.)
And then for the full picture, as the climate changes, there is more rain and less snow in the mountains, which means that instead of a nice steady melt filling the reservoir all year, the stream runs so full in the spring that the reservoir can’t hold it’s all, and then goes dry in the summer.
Latest Answers