– If water is constantly recycled, why are we concerned about conservation?
In: Planetary Science
Ultimately, it’s a question of energy.
Cleaning water takes energy. Moving water from place to place takes energy.
If we wastefully use clean water from local aquifers, that means we have to spend more energy to clean more water, or to move water from other locations to our location.
If water (in the form of snow) simply deposits itself on a local mountain, and then later melts and flows down to your city, it’s relatively cheap to get it into a form that you can use in your home or business. But if you use more water than that meltwater can provide, you might need to have water trucked in from elsewhere, or build a pipeline to bring it in from elsewhere. Both options use massively more energy than just letting snow melt and flow down to you on its own.
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