Is it more of a water bill thing, or do you actually effect the water supply? (Long showers, dishwashers, etc)
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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.
Yes, fresh drinkable water can be a limited resource in lots of places around the world. It takes a lot of time/money/resources to clean water so it’s drinkable again. Usually we can pull fresh water from rivers/aquifers but groundwater takes a long time to replenish naturally, and many rivers have become dry after getting diverted too much for agriculture/industry.
So it’s good to be careful with water use, although a lot of water is not used by individual consumers. It’s good to do some research on what actually wastes water though. For instance, dishwashers actually save water compared to hand washing.
In the grand scheme of things not really, it goes back to the water cycle of this planet
What you’re really wasting is the time, energy, and resources to treat/process/clean/move the water which is still something
You don’t really “waste” water as it all ends up back in the cycle eventually.
What you are really wasting is clean and safe water. There are costs and capacity issues with obtaining water as you don’t want to be drinking water that’s been flushed through someone’s toilet.
Some water sources are also being drained faster than they are refilling, such as underground aquifers which take thousands of years to refill or the colorado river which is having more water taken out than flow into it.
That depends on your source of water.
I live in the great lakes. My city’s water supply is water from Lake Erie. Where I live, fresh water is abundant. It is resupplied by rain quickly. The concept of “wasting” it seems weird. The Great Lakes are all surface water.
But, if I was supplied my water from a well, in a desert… That is ground water and works differently than gigantic lakes.
Both cases though, supply comes down to how and why it’s being used and treated.
Yes, there is a water cycle. Water evaporates, falls as rain, fills lakes, trickles into ground water.
The physical water molecules aren’t going anywhere, but if you drain an underground aquifer in 100 years that it took 1000 years to fill it before it was found, you’re gonna have a bad time. If you dump a bunch of carcinogens, fertilizer, and human waste into a lake, the cost of making it potable goes up. The treatment plant can only produce so much.
In most cases, what you waste is *clean* water, and the energy and other resources required to make that clean water. There are some exceptions (in deserts and such), but mostly if you live in a place that has plenty of rain, you’re wasting the energy involved.
What do you call 1 million gallons of fresh water with 2 gallons of sewage? Sewage. All one million gallons has to go to waste water treatment. That’s how you waste water.
I work for the water company and it’s very hard to read some of these comments.
Most potable water comes from rivers or wells. The water goes through a filtration and disinfection process. Samples are taken. Water is pumped to water towers. Water towers feed homes with gravity fed water pressure.
You run the sink while you brush your teeth wasting that water.
The water goes down the drain into either a septic system or a sewer system. If it’s septic the water is distributed onto your property through field lines.
If it’s sewer the waste water gets pumped back to a water treatment facility where the solids and liquids are separated. The solids get treated until they meet requirements to be either buried or used for growing hay for livestock. The liquids get treated to state, local and federal guidelines and put back into the River.
Did you waste that water when you brushed your teeth? Yes. Did it disappear? No
In Australia we’ve had water saving restrictions for decades now iirc.
Because we literally don’t have enough water and letting it just run down the drain unnecessarily is a waste as far as treated, potable water that people can drink and cook with goes.
Household water usage ultimately ends up back in the watershed. It is not entirely wasted, but does take energy to treat and send to your house. Agricultural water and water for lawns and other outdoor applications do in fact waste water. Californias entire agricultural system is based on enormous well water usage to grow water intensive crops in a desert. Perhaps desalination efforts could help reduce strain on watersheds, but it would cost quite a lot. I’d be willing it would cost less than losing all of Californias farmland when the aquifer dries up, though.
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