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
Besides a lot of the other answers which include valid points like treatment efforts etc. in that you’re wasting potable water by just letting it flow out of the system, there’s also the consideration of the capacity of a city’s water supply.
In some places that experience drought, in certain seasons the amount of water available to a large number of people can be very limited and a lot of effort goes into making sure there’s enough for at least the basics.
When the dams are running low, having a half million households pour hundreds of litres down the drain to wash cars and such every weekend could actually end with no drinking water being available.
It’s wasting because most of time, it will go in the sewer until it get filtrated and clean up which is a slower process than directly consuming it. The waste is not about water itself but the whole cost of the process and the resources needed for it
Wow, do…. Do people really need this basic conxept explained to them?
A lot of water that comes out of your tap is pumped from underground water that won’t refill for hundreds of thousands of years. The water isn’t gone and will fall in rain some other place but the water that comes out of your tap might realistically be gone forever to you
It’s not really the water that is wasted. It’s all the energy and processing that has gone into making it drinkable.
It was explained to me somewhat cynically: water has a cost. If you use a lot, and your neighbors use a lot, the cost to of the water goes up for everyone – including your industrial neighbor 3 miles away who happens to use your water system, but regularly consumes 50% of the system’s supply. They don’t like paying more for anything, so they ask everyone to use less so the prices stay low.
The real reasons are more nuanced and complicated – getting into things like aquifer access and water well density and whether or not it is legal to capture rain water if Nestlé is anywhere near your watershed. It has a lot to do with the cost to treat water.
You’re correct that the water isn’t actually wasted, per se. However, when wasting water, where it ends up usually isn’t somewhere readily available. Whether into the ground, which takes quite some time to become groundwater, or to a sewage treatment plant that requires time, energy and money, or ends up somewhere that it simply cannot be reused for the sake of drinking or nourishing the land. Essentially you are migrating the water to places that are less readily available to humans and/or wildlife or nature.
Wasting water can have different impacts depending on the situation.
In some places, like California, water is drawn from an underground aquifer. If water is drawn from that aquifer faster than it is naturally replenished, then the aquifer dries up over time. In extreme cases it can also cause “subsidence” which basically means the pores and channels that held water collapse and it can no longer hold water (and the ground level drops).
In places that draw water from rivers, wasting it can severely reduce the river water volume as the water that is drawn evaporates or ends up somewhere else. This can cause big problems for the fish and animals that rely on the water, but also other water users downstream as water levels drop (see: lake Mead).
I live next to a very large body of fresh water, wastewater is treated and returned, so we don’t have the same impacts as above, but in our case wasting water leads to excess energy use to pump and treat it as well as costs to upgrade infrastructure to increase capacity to serve that waste.
You’re right, it doesn’t necessarily waste the water itself. Water cycle and all that. It’s a waste of energy that was used to treat the water to make it potable, and will be a waste of energy to treat the water again downstream to make it safe to discharge back into the lake.
It could also be a waste of water itself in the sense that the availability of potable water is being poorly resourced by excess/needless use but you would only feel that in times of scarcity, but it’s technically existent as a concept in times of abundance too.
Wasted water is usually meant dirty water. If you spill it on the ground, you can’t just pick it up and drink if. You have to filter it before it’s safe to drink.
So the waste is more the waste of energy involved in re-cleaning the water used.
It’s not as complicated as some people make it out to be.
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