I’m very insecure with my water usage. Is it possible to “waste” water?
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Water is recycled by nature, but you can waste the effort that went into making it drinkable and pumping it to your house, the effort of the sewage treatment plant to make it clean enough for nature to recycle, and you can contribute to draining freshwater in nature quicker than it can be replenished.
You should move to the country, if this bothers you. When you live in a rural area, it’s extremely common to get your water from a private well, and have your drains & sewage treated by an on-site septic system. Your water gets sourced from the well, and the septic system eventually returns it to the water table (after the bacteria in the septic tank treat it). That’s a very efficient system. Nearly 100% of that water is recycled.
Of course, municipal wastewater treatment plants clean up the “used” water in essentially the same way as a private septic, and also quite efficiently. They just do it at a greater scale. However they are sometimes open-air in design, and do have some evaporative losses, and the treated water is normally released into waterways (not directly re-infiltrated back into the ground).
On the supply-side of the water question, cities may source their water from wells, rivers, lakes, etc., and efficiency varies due to the wide range of pre-use purification and processing such water may require.
As u/GalFisk stated, water is pretty much infinitely recyclable. The infrastructure that cleans and delivers your water is not. More demand means more water plants, more pump stations, more towers, more sewer plants, more draw on water sources that can take thousands of years to renew.
More than that, your individual water use is a drop in the pool. My local plants measure water production in Million Gallons/Day, and a good chunk of that goes to industrial use. More rural areas could see farms drawing down groundwater resources much faster than residential users.
Even with residential use, a lot of the demand comes from pools and landscaping. If you’re not washing a single outfit at a time, or taking 20 minute showers twice daily, you’re probably not a huge draw on the system.
Water is recyclable in the sense that water sources will replenish over time. It is however possible to overdraw from the source vs the rate at which it replenishes.
If you’re worried because there is a possible issue in your area, first learn why it is occurring.
Industry and agriculture are very large users, especially in some regions. We obviously need to eat, but we also can do agriculture in ways that don’t waste a lot of the water due to evaporation. We can also not farm alfalfa to ship overseas to feed cattle, and we can grow crops that don’t use a ton of water in arid regions.
Regarding residential usage, normal usage for cooking, showers, etc. is a drop in the bucket literally. However, “watering” your asphalt driveway to wash it instead of sweeping it or using a blower is poor use of water. Covering your pool to prevent evaporation when you’re not using it is also something you can do. There are ways to avoid wasting water that don’t require you to change your habits.
Water cycle resources: https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/freshwater/water-cycle https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/water-cycle
US EPA on conserving water: https://www.epa.gov/watersense/start-saving
Broadly yes water is recyclable. Water on earth goes into the atmosphere and rains back down. Assuming you’re not in a super rural area, the water that comes out of your faucets has been treated to be potable, safe to drink. It takes energy and materials to take water from lakes or rivers and make it safe.
If you are in an area under drought rules, follow those suggestions.
Wasting water would be things like running the shower for an hour before getting in, watering a lawn in the hottest part of the day, letting water leak out wherever uncontrolled, rinsing laundry ten times, flushing ten times… There’s a range between wasting water like that, above average use, average use, careful/below average use, and stressing yourself out like your water costs more than printer ink.
If your water usage stress is causing you to, for example, find non-water-using alternatives to basic household chores, only let yourself flush the toilet once a day, shower once a month, or run around the house making sure all your taps are closed after you already did, then it’s not a water issue but probably a stress/anxiety issue, and that’s a separate thing that can be addressed with proper professionals.
Ground water such as exists in aquifers and comes up in a well is a finite resource. It takes far longer to replenish than it does for us to pump it up to the surface. It’s a major source for many areas because there is not enough surface water to supply houses and supply farms and industry. That water is not destroyed, but once removed from the ground, used, and put down a drain, it will join a river and go out to sea. The water will still exist, but it won’t be available for use in the place where it came from.
It’s not possible to waste water itself, no.
When people talk about wasting water, what they *really* mean is wasting the energy required to transport the water. If you live in a city, it takes energy and infrastructure to transport, treat, and deliver that water to you, and if you dump a bunch into a drain or gutter for no good reason, that water has to travel through the whole process before it gets back into use again.
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