How come we never run out of water if everyone uses it?
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Where does the water go once you’ve used it? It’s not like it disappears. Whether you urinate it, or it’s shower water, dish water or otherwise, it goes right back where it came from. Ideally via a sewer treatment plant that removes the ick first.
Water doesn’t get destroyed. It keeps recycling. Some say we have drank the water that passed through everyone else historically. Genkis Khan. I don’t know if that’s bull or not…
Fun fact: We could run out of water… If we were really careless about it.
But we’re quite good at recycling it, removing as much pollutants as we can from it, and all that jazz. Plus, nature does a lot of that itself, by evaporating, or the water slipping down into the ground and leaving some contaminants into the ground instead, where other stuff can deal with it…
It goes around and around. Pour an acre-foot of water on a field — some will soak into the ground and run off into a river, thence to the sea, where it will evaporate and precipitate into somebody’s water supply. Or it will evaporate immediately from the field, and then the same. Or a plant will take it up and incorporate the hydrogen and oxygen into its tissue; later it will burn/rot/be eaten and turn into water vapor and/or CO2. And so on.
We use it but we don’t keep it. It goes back out into the system and someone else gets to use it again. It doesn’t get used up when we use it.
Water is H²O, so you’d need to electrically break the molecules, that can be done, but we’re not plants who take CO² and end up keeping the Carbon and expelling Oxygen. Most things use water for hydration and cooling, not as a fuel.
Water stays on Earth.
After using it, it mostly ends up in some combination of the ocean or atmosphere – and once it evaporates from the ocean, it’s in the atmosphere anyway. Then it rains – which is where our water comes from.
The critical part of “using” water is that we can’t drink or wash in dirty water – we’re using clean water and turning it into dirty water.
My city which is 12 miles north Boston Massachusetts is in a drought state that is critical. Our water reservoir is 50% empty. Massachusetts, as a New England, as in not the Arizona desert. As in the New England colonies, near the ocean, severe drought.
Most school children learn about [the water cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cycle) at some point, so that’s what you need to research. You drink tap water, you pee it out, it evaporates and forms a cloud, it rains down somewhere, we collect the rainwater into reservoirs and treat it so it’s safe to drink, your tap water comes from those reservoirs.
TL;DR is that the water doesn’t just disappear when it’s used, it changes state (solid/liquid/gas) or location (Antarctica, rain clouds, underground) and may be impure (mixed with coffee, polluted with acid, combined with human waste). While the water is always around, it’s not necessarily in a usable form or location. So “running out of water” isn’t really a problem, “running out of usable water” definitely is if we use it faster than the water cycle can replenish it so we have enough potable water where we need it.
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