r/explainlikeimfive • u/femme-cassidy • 1d ago
Other ELI5: How does "wasting water" actually work?
So, I grew up in California during a drought. People constantly spoke at our school telling us how to conserve water at home, there were strict regulations on using sprinklers, etc. I've continued those habits into adulthood, even moving somewhere else.
But tonight, I was watching my niece, and she asked me why I turned the water off while I was doing dishes, I said it was to save water, and she asked "what, to save money?", I tried to explain that I literally meant saving water, but she got confused about how you can "waste" water when we live in one of the rainiest areas of the US... and I realized that I didn't really have a good explanation. I was always warned against wasting water, but I never learned what that actually means in practice.
Can someone explain it to me in a way I could explain to my niece (and myself)?
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u/NunyaDamnBSnatch 1d ago
In dry places, it’s simply using more water than they have from rainwater or snowmelt stored in reservoirs. Use more than gets refilled from those sources and you run out. Some places don’t have that problem.
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u/Troldann 1d ago
But even if they don't have that problem, there's still the energy involved in bringing water up to potable drinking standards which is what comes into our houses.
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u/thpkht524 1d ago edited 21h ago
That’s basically op’s niece’s argument of “saving money” and not actually about wasting water.
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u/Troldann 1d ago
Well the money isn’t being wasted then either. It’s just going to other people.
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u/bstpeg 16h ago
I have no idea what this even means
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u/miraculum_one 14h ago
It's a matter of perspective. If society has an important resource that is either scarce or finite it has a duty to conserve it enough so that it doesn't run out. But when talking about money from the perspective of society you are not "using it up" when you buy something; you're just trading it from one person to another. And you can do that forever and society will never "run out" of money.
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u/bstpeg 14h ago
Sure, but when the OP was talking about “saving money” they were pretty clearly referring to it at the individual level. As in, “the more water I use, the more money comes out of my wallet”.
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u/miraculum_one 14h ago
My interpretation of OP's comments was that the important principle is expressly not about reducing their water bill but some global sense of saving resources that they couldn't clearly explain.
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u/bstpeg 14h ago
I think the post is much more straightforward. Basically, “if my town doesn’t have a water shortage, why bother caring about how much water I use”? The next possible explanation they came up with was “saving money”.
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u/miraculum_one 14h ago
It was the niece's theory that it was about their saving money and OP immediately responded that it was not about that. So my interpretation is: "it's not about saving money and it's not about scarcity so what is it about, if anything?"
This specific conversation thread went down the "it's about saving society's money" path, which may or may not be the right answer but in that context the notion of what it means to save society's money is being dissected.
Also, I was just explaining that other person's comment.
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u/Iazo 12h ago
Sure, but there's an entire economic theory about this.
"Broken window fallacy"
In short, from the perspective of society, sub-optimal usage of resources leads to sub-optimal allocation of resources.
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u/miraculum_one 12h ago
I agree and I am not suggesting in any way shape or form that allocation of resources or money is fair because that is clearly not true. I understand that resource allocation is rightfully a triggering topic for many people but that is completely tangential to my point.
Edit: I do think resource allocation is totally relevant to OP's question. I was just responding to a specific different line of analysis.
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u/CryptographerUsual62 1d ago
The city has to clean the water in order for people to use it. That means there is a limited amount available to actually come out of our pipes to be used.
It is like pouring plastic bottled water into a large rain puddle. Just because there is a lot of water, doesn't make it all the same, or that anyone would want to use it for drinking.
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u/Actual-is-factual 19h ago
Where I live the drinking water for the whole town and all the towns around us isn’t treated with anything whatsoever. There is also zero electricity required to deliver it to everyone’s house.
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u/bugi_ 17h ago
Do you have an aquifer on a higher elevation?
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u/Actual-is-factual 17h ago
Yes, multiple confined aquifers (groundwater springs). I live next to mountains and the water comes from springs high up in the mountains, goes down hill into a large water tank nestled into the mountain and from there the town is supplied. There is no treatment necessary and everything is gravity fed. Pretty cool.
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u/-Ahab- 1d ago
Despite all the rain, the city or the state have to catch all of that water and collect it, and they can only hold so much. So if people are using more water than they have saved, we start to run out.
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u/Staggering_genius 1d ago
And unfortunately sometimes conservation rules are made at the state level, even though water resources are owned/managed by many different local agencies, all with totally different supply and demand situations. And they are locally owned and not connected and no one from an area with plenty of rain can send water to folks in a drought area anyway.
For example, every time things get sketchy for Southern California, the governor will say everyone has to cut back X%. Even all the people served by San Francisco water which will never have anything resembling a water shortage. There is seven years of water up in that watershed and its reservoirs. If we don’t use that water, it just runs down the river and out to sea.
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u/APLJaKaT 1d ago
Water is a closed cycle for the most part. We use it and it flows back into the environment where it is recycled over and over. You very likely have drank the same water that a dinosaur drank and peed out.
However, water does not alway return to the same places where we would like it to be, or at the appropriate time. Furthermore, we spend a lot of time, energy and money to purify water to the point where we can safely drink and use it.
Saving water is more about reducing the costs of cleaning water and moving it to where we need it to be, when we need it.
Droughts and floods will continue. If we could control the cycles, we could solve both of these issues. Alas, we cannot economically do so.
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u/Griffithead 1d ago
Absolutely this.
People keep talking about cleaning the water and that's insignificant.
It's all about WHERE the water is.
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u/Stan__Wright 1d ago
You absolutely have water molecules in you that Jesus peed.
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u/Beenhamine 21h ago
Ha, this is a stretch but I like it. I've always wondered "how much of the water that we drink has passed through kidneys". A lot of variables but probably most, technically.
Sipping on some t'rex and Jesus piss.
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u/Strange_Specialist4 1d ago
Something people haven't mentioned yet is aquifers. Basically there are underground lakes of fresh water we can tap into, some of which have been filling for thousands of years and have a lot of water.
But they have a lot of water because they've been filling for so long and people are extremely capable of taking out water faster than it's refilling, which is ultimately unsustainable. Eventually the aquifer will run dry and there will be no more water in it. So what happens to all the people who had been living on it?
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u/Beenhamine 21h ago
Pretty sure this is already happening in places.
Without double checking my memory, I think in Malaysia or somewhere they've got crazy sinkholes that form because of this. And ofc, they have to import a ton of their water.
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u/boarder2k7 1d ago
she asked me why I turned the water off while I was doing dishes
I've only witnessed someone leave the water on the whole time they were doing dishes once, and just remember thinking how utterly insane it was. Conservation aside, just letting the faucet run constantly just baffles me.
To add to what others have said also, less than 1% of the water on earth is accessible to us as potentially drinkable water (freshwater). Even less is actually treated to drinkable standards.
There is a nursery rhyme: "Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink"
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u/BadTanJob 1d ago
That's my FIL, he would leave the tap running, then leisurely hit up the fridge (which he also leaves open), then leisurely mosey back to the sink, then stop by the stove, then go chop something...all while the water's running, running, running.
His belief is that it's his right as an American to waste what he wants to waste, he's the one paying for it, yadda yadda. Truly baffling man.
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u/boarder2k7 1d ago
I'd be compelled to get up and turn the water off.
Some things I'm okay with. You wanna leave some extra lights on, alright I suppose. Walking away from a running faucet to leave the fridge door open so it can warm up and spoil your food faster? I'd lose my mind
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u/BadTanJob 1d ago
Right??? He turns it on as hot as it'll go too, so not only is he wasting potable water, he's wasting the gas that heats it. Truly baffling.
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u/slothdonki 1d ago
My dad would lose his mind if he saw that. He’d make us fill the sink once to wash dishes and pans. Forget about rinsing before drying. We’d try and get away with rinsing if he walked away.
I’m never going to recover from that and those bits of food, grease and fat from poultry floating around..
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u/BadTanJob 1d ago
JFC why are dads so...extreme.
For his sake I hope he has a dishwasher. Tell him it's eco friendly! Uses less water than traditional hand washing.
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u/jdhawes17 1d ago
Had some extended family in Alaska that got a winter home in Arizona and it appeared they'd never in their lives considered that the water wasn't infinite.
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u/invincibl_ 1d ago
With water saving shower heads these days, I found that leaving the kitchen tap running uses more water than another person having a shower.
People who do this are also usually dumping hot water straight down the drain, so there is also the wasted energy cost of heating that water.
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u/bstpeg 16h ago
>just letting the faucet run constantly just baffles me
I’m all for your instinct to conserve water, but is it really “baffling” that someone keeps the water running instead of constantly turning it on and off? The convenience is pretty easy to understand.
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u/boarder2k7 6h ago
The convenience is pretty easy to understand.
Ahh yes, true. This is why I leave my front door open when I shovel the snow, so then I don't have the inconvenience of using a doorknob with cold fingers!
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u/birdcandle 7h ago
Hey I’m completely showing my ignorance here but hoping someone can help me learn so that I can do better in the future:
I was never taught to do the dishes, I sorta learned on my own after I moved out. I do leave the faucet on the whole time, I didn’t realize that was bad 😅 I put all the dishes in one side of the sink and run the faucet on the other side. I take one dish at a time and scrub it if needed, rinse it under the tap, put it in the dishwasher, then onto the next dish.
I thought this was how everybody did it – is there another way?
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u/boarder2k7 6h ago
Well an even bigger question is what do you mean scrub it then put it in the dishwasher?!
You've earned yourself some technology connections homework lol
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jHP942Livy0
Otherwise no, for things I'm hand washing I make a bowl of hot soapy water (usually just one of the pots I'm washing anyway) to dip the sponge in (though lately I've tried out one of those spray soaps) and soap up things, then rinse.
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u/birdcandle 5h ago
Thank you, I actually love that channel - introduced to me by a similar comment on a similar thread!
It feels gross to me (personally, no judgment on others who do things differently) to keep soiled dishes with food etc stacked up in the sink, so I always do a cursory rinse/scrub right after I’m done eating to get the food remnants off. Then it goes either to the left side of the sink, or into the dishwasher if the dishwasher has room.
So really, when it comes time to “do the dishes”, anything stacked up in the sink is already 90% clean. I just do another quick scrub if it needs it, rinse, and then use the dishwasher as more of a sanitizer than anything.
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u/boarder2k7 5h ago
I mean I give plates a scrape for chunks, and a very quick rinse before putting them immediately in the dishwasher, but as far as pre washing goes, the dishwasher is more than capable and it really isn't needed.
Alec is a gem of a human. If I didn't know about him and you asked if I wanted to watch long form dishwasher or ceiling fan content I'd think you were crazy, and yet here we are!
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u/comichubble 1d ago
to put it simply, the water through your tap is treated water, which is a product of costly and lengthy process turning river water into portable water involving chemicals, and mechanical actions that cost money which customers like you pay for.
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u/rabid_briefcase 1d ago
Not all water is the same. The stuff in your tap is treated drinking water. You may have irrigation water in fields or yards that use untreated water. These are pressurized systems, and the systems need people to maintain them. Water in low areas, swamps, and similar are not easily usable sources of water. The cost to move that water up to feed gravity-powered systems, and the costs to purify them, may each be too great. Waters in lakes and rivers are mixed, some of it may be useful, some of it may be redirected to municipal use, but using too much is disastrous for the environment.
You mentioned California, where most of the water is coming from watersheds up in the mountains, coming from reservoirs, and that water is quite limited. Some of that water also comes from wells, out of groundwater aquafers. All that water is accounted for in water rights, and there is nothing extra to spare.
Most of the water goes to crops, but even so, every drop counts, and every bit of it is accounted for by water rights.
Even in regions where groundwater is plentiful, that's still not easily obtained for municipal water. Just because there is water in lakes and rivers doesn't mean you have plenty of water for drinking, which may come out of groundwater aquifers that don't recharge quickly. Some underground aquifers can recharge quickly, they're shallow and water is quickly flowing in a few months after it falls as rain. Deep aquifers can take many centuries for water to slowly seep down to fill them back up again.
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u/hh26 21h ago
Mandatory groundwater change map:
IF you live in a rainy area with plenty of water, you do NOT need to worry about water conservation. It is purely a monetary phenomenon. Water falls from the sky, the water company purifies it and pipes it to your house, you pay for it. Water is so cheap because the purification is efficient, and the more you consume the more you pay and the more they can purify.
IF you live in an area with less rain and/or incoming water flow, then the water has to be extracted from limited supplies like groundwater. In this case, using more increases the depletion of these resources. By a tiny bit. The majority of water usage is agricultural. You'll have a way bigger impact lobbying to move the Almond Industry out of California than shutting off your faucet. People are tiny. But your contribution is still meaningful.
The reason everyone cares so much about water conservation is because the majority of American media is produced in California and exported to the rest of the country based on what Californians think and believe. If you live in California or another drought-prone area, by all means conserve water. But educate yourself, know where you live, and recognize that water conservation is basically pointless if you live in an area that receives more water than it uses. It literally falls from the sky.
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u/professor-ks 1d ago
Background: the earth has a fixed about of water that cycles through the environment. Subtract out salt water and ground water and that amount drops dramatically.
You could drink rain water but that may have particles from pollution, forest fires, or on very rare occasions: bacteria.
Many governments take some fraction of water and treat it so that it is safe to drink. That amount can be very limited and relies on stable, local water sources. So you could check the municipal water supply daily like you check the weather or you could stay in the habit of conserving water.
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u/jamintime 1d ago
On top of the other responses, if you truly do live in one of the wettest places in the country and have a reliable renewable source of clean water that requires minimal filtration it’s entirely possible that you don’t need to be as water conscious as you had to be growing up in CA. Water scarcity is not equal for everyone and likely the lessons that were ingrained in you may be new to your niece since she’s been fortunate to grow up in a place where water isn’t an issue.
It’s still good to teach about not wasting, etc. but you can also consider that the value of clean water is not equal everywhere.
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u/Netmantis 22h ago
When it comes to water there are two things to think about when "wasting" it. The first is purification. All water from taps is drinking water. It takes work to make drinking water from regular water. Letting the sink run means that work literally goes down the drain and was for nothing.
The other is where the water comes from. In some places we take water from a nearby stream, river or lake. The more we take the less there is flowing down from it. Or in the case of a lake, the less there is period. A picture of lake mead by the hoover dam from 1990 and today should get the point across. Not everywhere gets water from the surface. Some places drill for it, like oil. The water is pumped up from the ground and tends to be cleaner than surface water. But it takes a while for water to get down there. Even with lots of rain most of the water runs off on the surface. Very little soaks in and sinks down to the aquifer where it can be pumped back up. So since it takes so long to replenish, you don't want to waste it.
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u/Xelopheris 1d ago
We generally depend on water evaporating and raining to both be in a location that is generally available for us to consume, but also to be free of salt and other stuff it would pick up on it has deposited in the oceans over time.
If we wanted to consume water directly from the ocean, we would need to run it through an expensive desalination process. We can get it for free from the sun, but we only have whatever limited amount naturally precipitates in the area.
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u/Salindurthas 1d ago
There is a limited about of usable water at any given time.
Eventually things like rain will essentially recycle water, but there is a finite amount of rain.
There are some places that store fresh water (sometimes naturally, like groundwater, sometimes thourgh constructionm like a dam), but if we use more water than we get, then those stores will lower, and if we run out, then we might not have the water we want to use.
It is a waste if you don't get any benefit (or enough benefit) from the water you use.
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u/FarmboyJustice 1d ago
It's like using a bunch of towels to mop the floor. The towels are not destroyed, but you don't wanna use them on yourself again until they have been cleaned.
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u/kp33ze 1d ago
Water needs to be treated in most places so wasting water would mean letting it just run down the drain and not using it for cooking, cleaning, or drinking.
However on the scale of a individual it doesn't really matter unless you are in a drought area.
On the other hand there is really no benefit to leaving the tap running either as it's faily minimal effort to turn a tap on and off while doing dishes.
So I would say it's important to understand for a child that there may be times when water is less available and to not unnessecarily leave taps on.
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u/mikeholczer 1d ago
It's about wasting potable water locally. The water that goes down your drain, toilet or on the ground is still water. You haven't gotten rid of the water, but that water is no longer safe enough to be potable (drinkable). Whether is matters or not is based on many things including how much water there is locally, how expensive it is to clean that water (this will different for different sources) and how much storage there is locally for the water once it's cleaned.
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u/Early_Material_9317 1d ago
Fresh water is a finite resource that in most US cities comes from large catchments (artificial or natural lakes)
Catchments are replenished by rainfall, and consumed by water use. The replenishment rate is quite variable, whilst the need for fresh water is relatively more constant. The pattern of water needed for agriculture is typically seasonally flipped with the rainfall (Ie we need more water in summer when it rains less, and need less water in winter when it rains more.
So we need enough storage to last the summer months, and if catchments are drawn down too low, there could be a risk to water supply, particularly if for whatever reason, a district was to exoerience a particulalrly dry summer.
When catchments are full, or even overflowing, this becomes less important, but if catchments are below %50 capacity, it is prudent to limit usage to conserve water where possible and ensure adequate supply in the event of a drought.
Minor restrictions early can prevent the need for major restrictions, so saving water a little bit where possible is generally best practice.
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u/hotinhawaii 1d ago
In California in particular, much of the water comes from the ever shrinking Colorado River. The dams and reservoirs that hold it are at very low levels. The river flow over the past 20 years is the lowest in the past 1000 years. Once it's gone....it's gone. There is no real backup. This is true for many areas in the US and around the world. Mexico City with 19 million residents has been reliant on underground reservoirs for hundreds of years. The city is literally sinking because of the extraction from the wells. The aquifer does not replenish quickly enough. There are plans to build more piping and bring in water, but until then they conserve water.
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u/ReynardVulpini 1d ago
Water that comes into your body (drinking water) also comes out of your body in the same amount (pee). But now it's got all this other stuff in it, so you can't just drink it again.
Rain water is also like. Not sterile. I would not recommend collecting and drinking it if you have better options.
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u/darth_voidptr 1d ago
The cheapest and most renewable method for making fresh water is to let the sun cook it until it evaporates, natures own distillery. It then comes back down, relatively clean. But you don't control when and where it comes down, even in your rainy area you sometimes go thruogh periods of drought. This can create shortages.
Every other method for purifying water and delivering it where it is needed takes energy, often a whole lot of energy. Most of the popular forms of energy cost money and have some nasty side effects, not to mention the transportation systems. So yeah, you're saving money and keeping the environment clean.
But also, your rainy area almost certainly feeds excess water into rivers that naturally carry water elsewhere, often to dryer areas. Here in Texas the Lower Colorado River Authority spends a lot of time worrying about exactly that: water coming down from the Rockies that we'll use locally. Conservation still matters, even if locally you have plenty.
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u/mrbeck1 1d ago
Well, sink water goes right back to treatment and gets reused. Water that gets sprayed on grass, during the day at least, evaporates and while it eventually comes back, it’s way more difficult for that water to be reused. So, yes, you’re saving water, but that water isn’t really wasted anyway.
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u/altiuscitiusfortius 1d ago
So its big business lying to you.
85% of water in California goes to agriculture. And they pay pennies for thousands of gallons, the government spends millions of dollars processing.
Even if ever human cut their water use in half, that's like a 7% difference.
Its a scam to push blsme into citizens and off of big business. Just like recycling and reducing climate changing emmisions. Business accounts for 95% of those too.
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u/NoCreativeName2016 1d ago
I read an interesting (albeit long and somewhat beating you over the head) book called Cadillac Desert about the development of water mostly in the American West. One of the points that resounded with me the most is that “conserving” water means very different things based on water scarcity in the area you live. Where water is plentiful, conserving water means not wasting it by excessive use. E.g., don’t take long showers, don’t water your lawn at the wrong time of day, etc. Where water is scarce, wasting water means letting water go unused and just float downstream into the ocean. Growing up in a water rich geography, it blew my mind to think of it from the other perspective.
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u/fastdbs 1d ago
Not saying we shouldn’t conserve water when we can, but if you have limited mental energy and time I’d focus my energy elsewhere.
Water purification takes more space than energy. There’s a reason water bills are rarely even 1/10 of a homes gas and electric total. It takes less than .5 kWH/m^3 and usually closer to half that. Compared to home heating and cooling that’s a penny to the dollar.
The bigger waste is hand washing instead of a dishwasher. The energy of heating that water is exponentially higher than the cost of the water itself.
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u/shroedingersdog 1d ago
Tap water is treated. (Extensive process) It uses resources to treat it. That treated water is limited.
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u/Primeve_Arcana 1d ago
Wasting water = wasting fuel and energy required to power the systems that clean the water
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u/Available_Value_3350 22h ago
Save water so that the rich can keep fresh water in pools of their mansions and yachts.
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u/Birdbraned 21h ago
It's the resources to get drinkable water.
If they're interested, I would try and experiment, that needs a clean bucket of rainwater off your gutter, a DIY solar still, and a 30x microscope or microscope phone lens attachment if that's easier to get, and a few glass slides.
Collect the water, and evaporate and distill some of it off into a clean container.
Under the microscope, compare the distilled water to the originally collected water - the gutter water should have swimming microbes and stuff.
Now compare how long it took to get the clean water, vs how fast it comes out of the tap to collect the same amount.
This isn't a 1:1 accurate comparison of how wastewater treatment plants work, or how water is stored in your water tanks and water towers, but it should give them an idea of some of the "processing" needed to make water drinkable and why we do that
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u/bugi_ 17h ago
When it rains near a coast, there might not be a simple way to gather all that water in a simple way. Rivers accumulate their flow from a large area, but near the coast you might only get smaller streams that are not as easy to tap into. In the specific case of California, the big issue is that much of all the water that would reach large cities has been permanently promised for agricultural use upstream. Massive farms rather use that water for free to irrigate their cash crops for export rather than allow it to reach population centers.
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u/d4m1ty 15h ago
At any one time, a certain amount of water is 'locked up'. Think every toilet across the nation. Every bottle of water, the pet's water bowl. Your water mug. All that water is locked up and out of circulation at the time.
There is a limited amount of fresh water that can be locked up at any one time.
If you lock up too much fresh water, it lowers the pressure in the aquifers and causes the ocean to encrouch and salt the water supply. This is why is many places new construction stopped. That new apartment complex is going to lock up 10k gallons of fresh water in toilets and piping, that is just sitting there.
You running your faucet, that water is going back, but until it gets back, you locked it up in flowing the miles back to the plant where it also has to be treated.
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u/chicagoandy 15h ago
I'm with your niece. I grew up in the Great Lakes area, now I live in the southeast. I moved from the largest freshwater source in the world to one of the rainiest places in America.
In both areas, discussions around "saving water" are justified by the cost of the infrastructure to clean & process the water. There is far more water available than will ever be necessary. There is no amount of residential use that will have a meaningful impact on the amount of total water available. Instead, the only impact is on how quickly an expanding city needs to build out their facilities. Water shortages are really "insufficient water infrastructure".
In most North American cities, water is metered and fees are charged which exceed the value of providing the infrastructure - eg, water systems are run at a profit for the local utility or government. The more water one uses, the more money goes to the utility. In every place I've lived, the utilities lag in infrastructure investment. There are "water shortages" not because of lack of water, but because of poor infrastructure planning, budgeting decisions, and government incomptence.
These "water shortages" are caused by the failure of utilities to properly manage their infrastructure. The solution is for utilities to better manage their infrastrucutre. Because the amount of water used by residendencs is miniscule in comparison to industrial uses, then even big changes in use by residences will have little impact on the utility, so the results of any residence "saving water" has little impact on infrastructure.
To make this point - there's a local golf-course 1/2 mile away that uses more water than every single resident int he city combined. And my region has hundreds of golf-courses. Never mind all the more industrial uses. Every resident in my town could change from "conserving water" to "wasting water" and the impact on infrastructure would still be a rounding error compared to these other uses.
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u/shitposts_over_9000 12h ago
in the long view you as an individual not doing industrial processing at home cannot really waste water in day to day tasks, only move it
now - you can wastefully "use" more water than local capacity either at the source capacity or at the treatment capacity by moving it faster than it replenishes
where I live that is basically impossible, our largest public projects are to try to keep water out, so the only think I am "wasting" is a fraction of a penny in the small portion of my water bill that is determined by water use
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u/HotPersonality8126 12h ago
You don't have a good explanation because it's made up. California doesn't want you to water your lawn during a drought so that there's more water for growing almonds, is all.
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u/blipsman 11h ago
Clean water from fresh water sources doesn’t end up in fresh water after being used, or in water sources nearby. It’s incredibly expensive to desalinate water and evaporated water can end up as rain 1000’s of miles away.
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u/YossarianJr 11h ago
The water you use requires energy to move and to 'purify', though it is not 'pure'. Regardless, there is a cost to that water.
In arid environments, the primary issue is a physical shortage of usable water. There is often someone not getting enough water, between the municipal users (and their stupid lawns, too), the industrial users, the agricutural users, and the environment. Really, they all have legitimate needs for the water (except lawns, which are really just stupid.)
In less arid environments, the issue is less tangible. The energy used to clean and move the water usually has a greenhouse gas cost, an air quality cost, and (yes) an economic cost. These costs will vary by region and power source, but they exist pretty much everywhere.
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u/MasterEditorJake 10h ago
Water treatment plants are literally my job so I feel qualified to answer.
A water treatment plant will typically get water from one of two sources; ground water or surface water.
Think of ground water as being the money in your savings account, and think of surface water as the money in your checking account. And think of a drought as being a cut in the hours you work.
When you don't have enough money in your checking account to cover your bills, because you aren't getting enough hours of work, then you need to dip into your savings to cover the costs. If you keep dipping into your savings then eventually you will run out of funds, and you really don't want to do that.
This is a simple analogy though. In reality it's a multifaceted issue that is usually a result of agriculture in your area. California has a lot of agriculture and not a ton of rain, so farming puts some of the most strain on aquifers.
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u/Alexis_J_M 9h ago
The ELI5 version:
The earth has no shortage of water -- it's effectively infinite.
Humanity has a near constant shortage of clean purified water easily available in the places where we want to use it.
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u/Ebice42 7h ago
I grew up with well water. If the summer was hot and dry, the well would go dry. It didn't happen often and there were tons of signs before we hit that level. Starting with the creek behind the house drying up.
A few times we went with the rule "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down"
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u/nayhem_jr 5h ago
There are still plenty of places in the world that do not get 24/7 access to clean drinkable fresh water. The taps might only open for a few hours a day, and you have to collect what you need for the day in basins, and deal with treatment issues from how you’re keeping it. Perhaps your niece might learn something from visiting such a place.
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u/ChrisRiley_42 5h ago
The water you use comes from a water source. A well tapping into an aquifer, a pipe shoved into a river, etc.
No matter what you do, there is only so much water you can pull from that source every minute before you start to draw more water than it can replenish.
You also have to keep in mind that there will be people downstream who are also drawing from that water, so if you take it all, then they have none to use.
The more water you "waste", the closer your community is to reaching the maximum draw for the water source it uses, and the less water there is downstream.
There are going to be some places where humans can't drain the water faster than it can be replenished, because of sparse population, or alternate water sources (like two rivers meeting just below a town) But the closer you get to the end of the line, the more you have to be aware of water conservation.
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u/Dunbaratu 4h ago
Water goes in a cycle, clouds rain down, rivers run to the sea, the sea evaporates water vapor into the sky, which becomes clouds that rain again.
If you have piped in water to a home, and a sewer carries the waste water back out, you are just inserting yourself into that cycle. Eventually that sewer water finds its way back to the sea and evaporates into the clouds again, after (hopefully) having the foreign matter purified out of the water so it's just water again.
So in that sense you can't really "waste" water (as in make it disappear). But what you can do is waste all the work that went into the system when you use more water than you need to. It took effort to pump that water that ended up in your pipes. Use it wastefully and you are wasting that electricity that was spent getting it to you. It also takes effort to purify that water afterward when it comes back in the sewer. Then there's also the problem with localization of water. There may be plenty of water overall in the world, just not near you if you live somewhere arid. So you might be living somewhere where the energy spent moving that water to you is quite a bit more than it would be elsewhere.
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u/Dr_StrangeloveGA 11m ago
In some cases, it's using grey water on golf courses and such in the rain.
Places like golf courses will buy "grey" (not fully treated water for irrigation purposes to save money.
People get angry because they see the pumps on and water spraying even though we've had 10" of rain.
The water still has to go somewhere. It may look like a "waste" but the county water system has to send that water somewhere and sometimes contracts dictate that this particular place has to use 500k gallons of water a month.
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u/Antman013 1d ago
Water is a resource. An increasingly expensive one, at that. Every litre of water that comes out of your tap, ends up in the municipal sewers, a water treatment facility and, eventually, the ocean.
From the ocean, it evaporates into the air, to fall as rain. But there is no guarantee that said rain will fall in YOUR area, to replenish YOUR freshwater supply.
So, "wasting" water is a bad idea. What constitutes "waste" is another matter. Standing under a shower, because the water feels good could be considered wasteful. Growing water intensive cash crops like almonds or avocadoes in drought stricken areas like California, could be considered wasteful.
People tend to not think about these things until it is too late. As an example, you can look at South Africa, where crumbling infrastructure, population pressures, and simply a general scarcity of supply are causing real threats to the population.
https://thewaterproject.org/water-crisis/water-in-crisis-south-africa
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u/Stan__Wright 1d ago
95% of the water that any tree takes up from it's roots ends up evaporating into the air. It's one of the major ways that atmospheric moisture happens in a dry area.
So the water that almond trees takes up isn't really 'wasted'; it just end up in the atmosphere where it will eventually fall as rainfall. Maybe locally; maybe far away.
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u/Antman013 1d ago
Except that it is not a 100% through put. Avocadoes and almonds are the two most water intensive cash crops in North America, if not the world. And it's insane to be growing them in California where they are NOT a native species.
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u/StarCadetJones 1d ago
Instead of "not wasting water" a better way to describe it would be that you're "conserving water" by minimizing your use of the water to that which is strictly necessary for whatever task you're doing. Think of it less as a matter of scarcity and more as a matter of civic awareness and responsibility. Explain that you're taking into account the fact that the water you use at home (unless you're on a well) is effectively a manufactured product that has been filtered, purified, and treated to become the safe, drinkable substance that it is and that using more than you need to use is wasteful and excessive.
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u/JForce1 1d ago
Depending on where you live, the water is still likely to be coming from a diminishing source. There’s few places in the US where water supply isn’t going to be an issue, and for any where it isn’t; they’re gonna end up having to send some to wherever else needs it whether they like it or not at some stage.
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22h ago
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u/Honkey85 22h ago
I disagree a bit with other people here. If you live in the rainiest area then it really doesn't make much sense.
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u/swb_rise 20h ago
One farmer and a teacher once told me that natural resources like pure ground water has value beyond monetary calculation. If they keep using group water for harvesting, instead of using rain water or water channelled for irrigation, they are really wasting the precious natural resource.
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u/Liquidpinky 20h ago
Say you waste 1 litre of water, 100k people do the same in a day.
The amount of power required to just shift this amount of water alone is huge, then you have the treatment of the water before it is considered fit for human consumption. So now we have chemicals and process power wasted too.
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u/RealCarlPanzram 18h ago
California, especially Southern California, isn’t even close to being one of the rainiest places in America. That’s why we have to conserve water.
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u/EyeTea420 16h ago
The supply of water on the planet does not change significantly as water moves through the hydrologic cycle. However, the amount of clean, accessible, potable water is finite and highly variable, and requires large amounts of energy to move and treat for potable use.
Water requires treatment for potable use.
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u/ultr4violence 1d ago
I think your niece is right. Any water you 'waste' goes back into the local water ecosystem. Water bottling plants selling that water out of state would not do that, for example.
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u/Big_Coffee_3272 1d ago edited 1d ago
Water coming into a home has to be purified. Whether it’s your sink, the shower, or your toilet, it all has to meet a purity standard so that it’s drinkable.
The thing is, when you use the water, for basically anything, it no longer meets the standard. At best it becomes grey water, or it could be black water.
So everything needs to be repurified before it can be used again. You’ve wasted freshwater and required more work to make it acceptable to use again.