Why do we need to save water in our households, even if we live in regions with rivers, lakes, green landscape and a good amount of rain?
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It costs energy to clean and prepare water for human use. Even if there’s a lot of rain, using water you don’t need means that more energy has to spent on treating and preparing more water for use, and that’s energy that could be used elsewhere.
You don’t need to as much as places in drought or on aquifers. But overused rivers dry up, aquifers do the same. And processing unclean water to human use is consumptive.
The water in the rivers, lakes, and green landscape could have diseases, impurities, or even chemicals in it. We have to build very large water treatment facilities and use a lot of energy to clean water so it’s safe to drink.
But also the pipes between those facilities and your house have leaks. This is usually OK, because the water is under pressure and that pressure helps push dirt and other impurities out of the pipes where the cracks/holes are. However, if too many people use water all at once, and the leaks are too extensive, pressure can drop in the system and impurities can make it into the pipes, making the water unsafe.
So it’s not a good idea to waste water, because it puts strain on the system everybody relies on and wastes energy cleaning water that didn’t get used.
The Colorado River used to pour over 16 million acre-feet into the Gulf of California every year (almost five cubic miles for reference). Now water rarely reaches the Gulf in part because of the tens of millions of people and farms pulling water from it. Every little bit saved helps if everyone does it.
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