Like when ppl say don’t wash your yard or car with a hose. Isn’t the extra water or for that matter all water either seeping underground and adding to groundwater table or being evaporated into nature to be recycled? In both cases the water will be filtered enough to be potable….
In: Physics
Water has to go through a water treatment plant to be able to safely drink. If it just flows out into the ground and eventually the river/lake/ocean the treatment was a waste.
You’re not talking about moving lake water to the grass or something like that. You’re talking about wasting treated water. It takes a lot of money and resources to treat water.
Also there’s not a lot of good clean freshwater. Once it’s contaminated it can take many years for it to go through the natural cycle to be drinkable again.
Wasting water isn’t saying that it’s destroyed. It’s often that it gets converted into a state where it can’t readily be used again.
Like if you leave the tap on when you brush your teeth, the water goes to the waste water treatment plant where it needs to be actively treated to make it not toxic to wherever they release it or treat it more for reuse. If you wash your car excessively, it ends up in the storm drain with all the street drain water, which may or may not be reusable without extensive filtering. If you water your field excessively, most of that water evaporates, where it will condense eventually, but might do so a state or so over where they aren’t short on water.
You’re not so much wasting water, you’re wasting the transportation and filtering it takes to get that water to you, or back to nature responsibly.
Water will eventually be cycled back into rain water at a certain point but during the inbetween of those stages the total usable water goes down as it will need to be obtained again through rivers or ground water which will take a while before it goes back to 100% what it was before. And certain stuff like watering your lawn and cleaning your car with a hose uses up way more water than it needs to so you are using up the available pool of water which will take a while before it becomes usable again. So if we have a bunch of people using water inefficiently then it could result in drought like conditions for a while you wait for the cycle to refill the available water.
So wasting water is more so not using the amount of water we have access to efficiently which can reduce the available access to that water which the natural cycles can’t quite keep up with.
Your water at your home arrives at some cost, dependent on the difficulty to deliver it. And if you are told not to wash your car, then there is probably a limited supply of water for everyone in your area. Depending where you live, it may be very difficult to recover enough water for every person’s needs.
One doesn’t snap one’s fingers to make water conveniently ready and accessible. Water molecules don’t always flow abundantly to a location you can easily retrieve them when you live in a place where there is worry if everyone will have enough water. 💦 That water will go somewhere, maybe far or maybe not. There might not be enough volume of water for everyone in the first place in your area to sustain life well.
It is kind of an important resource, so best not to waste it when you may need it.
So, you’re right that on a long enough timescale it’ll even out. But think of it this way – if you had a pound of pure gold, and I took it and threw it into a volcano – no harm done – eventually that gold will find itself in the rock to be mined again. Right?
The water you wash your car with is drinking water. It takes a lot of work to make it drinkable and that water is expensive. Your municipality may only have so much capacity to provide drinking water. And it will make it into the groundwater table, but that can take a decade. Meanwhile, your city needs to pump out even more water, which [can cause problems](https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/location-maximum-land-subsidence-us-levels-1925-and-1977).
So, at a minimum it’s a waste of money, it’s a waste of infrastructure, and it potentially means that your region is using water faster than it can be replenished (true in most of the world).
It is a closed loop, some caveman had a drink of water, a couple hours later he took a piss behind the cave.. we are drinking that water.. The problem of wasting water, is the bottling of it, and keeping it cold in fridges.. We have removed so much water from the system, locked up in cold fridges, the planet has to compensate, so melts ice.. That is water waste, stop the bottling of water in fridges…
It’s not going back underground, there’s not enough water to penetrate that deep. Most of it is evaporated or runs off.
Run off goes down to the ocean, and eventually it will turn back into clouds, travel inland, and rain down.
The problem is only X amount of water will reach inland, as a function of cloud dynamics, and only (X-Y) amount will be captured as useable water in water tables and reservoirs.
If we use more than X amount of water, the available fresh water will continually get lower and lower until we don’t have enough.
Aquifers are replenished at some maximal rate. If we draw from them faster than that rate they will dry up. So yes water does get recycled but we can still use up all the available water in an area and run out of it.
This is somewhat location dependent, certainly if you live in a low population density area with lots of rainfall, water conservation may not be that relevant. But in cities or in dry areas it is especially important as they can easily exceed the rate water is replenished in aquifers.
The water that comes out of your tap is clean. The water that comes out of the ground is not, it has to be cleaned before being distributed for people to drink. You aren’t wasting the water but are wasting the cleaning.
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