eli5 Is there a reason the waste water like from showers can’t be filtered through pipes and used for toilet water?
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Water needs to be under pressure to go uphill, like from the toilet shut-off valve up into the tank. But when water from the main supply leaves a faucet and enters a drain, it loses all pressure.
So a water-capture system would need some way to repressurize the water in order for it to be useful. There’s ways to do that, but they’re largely mechanical, and any time you have mechanisms in contact with water, the useful life of those mechanisms is hugely degraded by the presence of just about anything *in* the water.
It’s just easier to plumb a toilet from mains water because it comes pressurized from the main – it already contains the useful energy you need for it to be forced up into the toilet tank. Mains water is cheap enough that it doesn’t make a lot of sense not to “waste” it in toilets (it’s actually not a waste; toilets are the most important use of water in the household, probably.)
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