How can we run out of clean water ?

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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?

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18 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s more about “Cheap clean water”, rather than running out of clean water.

Agriculture and industry uses lots of water for growing plants, and industry uses lots of water in their processes for things like cleaning things between different steps in the process.

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