Is it more of a water bill thing, or do you actually effect the water supply? (Long showers, dishwashers, etc)
In: 2176
“Do you really waste water?”
No. You waste other things, like energy.
Side point — Dishwashers are more energy/water efficient than handwashing dishes.
Since you mentioned it, dishwashers use very little water. You can hear how long they run the water before starting the cycle—it’s about as long as you would run it to wash 2 dishes. And they do that 2 or 3 times per cycle. So they’re washing dozens of dishes and only using as much water as you would to hand wash 6 or 7
No.
“Don’t waste water” are campaigns to educate people to stop using water unnecessarily because it takes time and money to treat the water they’re using.
Brushing teeth with the water running returns the water to the treatment plant for another cleaning, which takes time and money.
There’s a finite amount of potable water. Potable is the level in which it’s safe to drink. Unfortunately, it’s also distributed in the same system in which potable water isn’t needed, such as washing a car, watering a lawn, etc. Piping is expensive too.
Campaigns of “don’t waste water” is to prevent excessive depletion of drinking water.
Cadillac Dessert is a fantastic book that covers the water issues in the western US if you’re interested in learning more.
Don’t forget it takes hundreds of gallons of water per item to simply make clothing. Keep this in mind when clothes shopping, try to do resale. People gonna be committing violenc over water as potable supplies decrease in the next 20 years. Get used to rationing it.
You’re not really wasting *water*. You’re more wasting the resources that treated the water and sent it to your home.
Edit: the above does not apply to areas affected by drought.
This depends where you live.
I live less than a mile from Lake Michigan. Our city’s water treatment facilities are at like 1% of capacity or something crazy like that. We get a credit on our water bill for using sprinklers in the summer. It’s like a rebate on the additional water usage in summer; they don’t actually care what you use it for but they assume you are watering your lawn and garden. I think this is some kind of “beautification” measure, but that’s just a guess.
Excess water down the drain affects waste water treatment. If there is a lot of rain, some of which gets into the sewage, untreated sewage can get dumped into the lake. So, a person might be contributing to they if they have a constantly leaking toilet or just leave their taps open because they are crazy or whatever. But right now, it’s been pretty dry and I doubt there has been any sewage dumping all summer.
In winter, if it is extremely cold, people will be encouraged to leave water running at a trickle to prevent freezing pipes. No one worries about the waste of water. The costs of water damage from burst pipes would be much higher than the (practically free) water. Our water bills come every two months and might be like, I don’t know, $30 or $40. It’s on auto-pay and hardly worth paying attention to.
On the other hand, most people don’t live near the largest bodies of fresh water on earth. Many people depend on groundwater or aqueducts. Southern and central California has lots of people and also grows a ton (well many, many tons) of our food. Wasting water is definitely a problem, particularly when there is drought. I’ll leave it to others to give an eli5 on why.
Dishwashers, by the way, generally use less water than hand washing. Dishwashers are a way to save water.
Someone may have mentioned this, but dishwashers actually use much less water than hand washing, generally speaking.
Absolutely. While water recirculates, freshwater and specifically your local water source is not infinite. The water you pull from a river, lake, or aquifer drains into a river that feeds into the ocean, where it becomes salty and undrinkable.
It will go through the water cycle and come back down as rain, but if you’re consuming more from your local water source than is fed into via natural processes it, it’s going to run dry.
The amount of fresh water is limited by the replacement capability of rain and snow fall.
“Wasting” water puts a dent in what’s available overall.
While individuals using lots of water to keep mono-culture lawns hydrated has an appreciable impact, the big users are industry and agriculture. Being told to take short showers or not play in the water is a strategy by big business to make us think WE are the problem. Same goes for fossil fuels, we could electrify all we want but the problem doesn’t go away unless industries change how they get power.
Latest Answers