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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The issue isn’t water, it’s clean water. We have limited ability to clean water but the big problem is desalination (removing salt). When it rains that water doesn’t just go to us in our taps it goes to crops, sewage etc. Removing salt from water at scale is very difficult and expensive so we are basically relying on rain water and recycled sewage. When there’s not a lot of rain, supplies drop
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