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
The issue isn’t that the water just disappears. It’s that we need it where humans can drink it and it’s not getting there.
The surface of the Earth is mostly non-drinkable oceans so any rain that falls there is useless to us for drinking/food/etc.
Then there’s the issue of humans settling where water was never terribly plentiful. Places like Phoenix or Los Angeles have tons of people but not very much fresh water so it has to be pumped in from elsewhere.
Add to that the fact that weather patterns are shifting and places that once got just enough rainfall aren’t getting nearly enough. [Lake Mead](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mead) is the man-made reservoir created by the Hoover Dam. It hasn’t been at full capacity since the 1980’s and has recently been dropping rapidly, currently sitting at ~25% of it’s total capacity.
Then you have places like Chicago and Cleveland that are on very large freshwater lakes. They aren’t likely to run out of fresh water any time soon but that doesn’t do much for the people living thousands of miles away.
“Toxic waste” is a blanket term that covers a large variety of pollutants. Most of them don’t evaporate with the water but some may. However, surface-level pollutants can filter down into the soil and contaminate underground water supplies. Once that happens, you can’t really get it out so the water has to be filtered, possibly at great cost, before humans can use it.
Latest Answers