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
To add to what others already said, most water on Earth is in seas and oceans. However it is “salty” water and [getting most salt out of seawater is not really a cost-effective process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination), at least with current technology.
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