It’s always confused me why we use our very limited fresh water supply for plumbing & cleaning our vehicles, why can’t we use salt water? We have so much more of it.
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Salt water is far, far more corrosive than potable water. The amount of damage it would do would far outstrip any benefit.
We would need two separate delivery lines and two waste water lines as well. Developing and installing the second infrastructure is cost prohibitive and as we move further inland, less feasible to transport that much water.
Presumably you could do so on coasts where salt water is plentiful, at least in toilets. You probably would not want to bathe in it. However, it would require an entire new water system that could handle both fresh and salt water. Separate pumping stations, water lines and possibly waste treatment stations. Creating all that infrastructure in most cities would be a massive undertaking that would be incredibly expensive and time consuming.
You would need to make two sets of pipes going into every single building, one with salt water, and one with fresh water. And that would only be useful for places near coasts that had a lot of salt water available. Likewise, pipes that carry saltwater need to be replaced far more often, as the salt corrodes the metal pipes.
It’s a lot of hassle, and isn’t seen as worth the expense.
Saltwater is corrosive as many have mentioned and it is only available on the coast and requires a completely y separate water distribution system. It would be terrible to clearna vehicle because you add salt which is quite corrosive.
There is another alternative for toilet usage. You can use gray water, which is wastewater from another source than the toilet. You can collect and filter all or some of it like just from the shower. You need a bit of filtering but not a lot. There is not need to make it potable just clean enough to use in the oiler, plane irrigation, or cleaning a car.
It requites local change in a building but no changes in water and wase infrastructure.
Because the amount of work that would it would require to plumb every house with a potable and non-potable water source just for the toilet far outweighs the rewards. Salt water is also far more corrosive than fresh water so pipes would have to be either made from plastics or be replaced regularly. Also, waste water treatment plants are designed to process dirty fresh water, not salt water; salt is very costly to remove which is a problem since waste water treatment plants discharge their water back into rivers; the added salinity would wreak havoc on local ecosystems.
The question of treatment and discharge becomes a problem. With fresh water, once the waste is removed or treated, it can be discharged to any river or common water source. With salt water, it would be extremely difficult to remove the waste (for related reasons, bacteria that break down human waste do not like salt) *and* the salt before it’s discharged to an otherwise freshwater river.
At high concentrations salt water can be toxic to the “bugs” that treat the wastewater at the treatment plant. Believe there are places in Asia that use seawater or brackish water for toilets
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