From my understanding, water has a pretty complex life cycle that can boil down to (hehe) this : it’ll move around in the ground and in the air forever, sometimes passing through alive creatures in the process.
But water is water, if I buy 100L of bottled water and pour it to the ground, is it really wasted? It’s just moving through the cycle and it’ll come back just as clean eventually. The waste is financial for me or for the cleaning process in the water treatment plant. But really the water on the planet is always the same amount, right? It’s finite, but both abundant and “self cleaning”, no?
When I see the rivers being dry I can’t help but think the water is just elsewhere, which is just a matter of reaching it.
Bonus question : How does toxic waste affect that cycle? Is evaporating enough to be clean again?
In: 65
it’s a rate problem.
Lets just take an example.
I use 100L a day. Washing, cleaning, eating, using it in squirt guns etc.
It washes out, down to the ocean. It evaporates, rains, percolates and gets filtered.
But it only rains 80L into my well. I still have plenty of water in the well, but I have less. And if I always take more than is replenished then eventually this location will run low enough that I can’t draw 100L today. I’ll only be able to draw 80 today, then put off my other uses till tomorrow. Or curtail them entirely.
Its a bit like money. You spend it. It never disappears. Somebody else has it, uses it and passes it on. But can *you* run out of money? absolutely. And a person or institution could hoard it so that everyone else starts to have problems.
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