to not understand how you waste water

[moogster1a]

if you leave a tap on all day / flush the loo loads/ wash every item of clothing you own, the waste water goes down the pipes and basically to waste water treatment plants, cleaned up, and put back in the clean water system.
I see how this can be expensive, but the water isn't actually wasted, so why are we encouraged to use the same amount as if we were living on the skeleton coast of Namibia?

yes, there is enough water, it is just mostly in the wrong place.

if people didn't all want to live in sunny dryish places, then we wouldn't have a water problem really, there are parts of the UK where you can generally collect enough rain water to meet any family's needs. but people don't like living in very very wet places.

also, plants grow better in warm places, ideally plants have warmth, sunshine and rain, but there are limited places with those ideal conditions so we grow plants in hot dry places and we pump the water in to irrigate.

Is this a spoof thread? I mean - do people really think that as soon as we run the tap then a reservoir gets filled up?

Fluffles is right.

The 'waste' would be the energy wasted in pumping and treating water that didn't need to be pumped and treated. It takes energy to pump water around, to treat it before it goes into the sea, and to build and maintain the pumping stations and the treatment plants (i.e. think carbon footprint).

All water is recycled eventually, but the key word is eventually.
I've run about in the bottom of the huge reservoirs, in Wales, that serve the midlands. They don't refill in a single rain storm, they need a good wet winter and spring.
Meanwhile, the underground aquifers, relied on by many dryer parts of the world, rely on water that has taken thousands of years to percolate through the rocks.

There are a number of issues involved, particularly in the UK:

• the way the infrastructure is set up (the Lakes may have masses of water, but that is no use in East Anglia where there's drought)
• the energy requirements
• leaks in the system

Yes, if you consider water on a global scale under geological time scales it is a closed system and the volume of water is constant. But when the reservoirs in the South Downs are low and its only May and that's the only source of water you can use to supply drinking water to 1,000's of homes (whilst trying to leave enough to keep the rivers running and avoid an ecological problem), knowing that if you wait a few years (5 to 10) they'll be full most likely be full to capacity again isn't much help when a hot dry summer is predicted.

Desalination is common in the Middle East. Although its quite illuminating in countries such as Oman how easy it is to spot those residences that flaunt their wealth - they're the only ones that are can afford to squander fresh water to maintain a garden. "Normal" residential areas are notable for the lack of greenery, such that a lawn is a massive status symbol.

Yes, industry could and should do more. Yes, water companies could fix leaky systems. Yes, there are other people who could make a bigger difference than any of us as individuals.

But most, if not all, of the solutions to the big problems are going to take years to design and implement. Right here, right now, we can all do something to avoid using excess drinking water - be it washing veg in a bowl and then pouring it on the garden rather than down the drain, not leaving the tap running when cleaning your teeth, using a water-but to collect rain water for the pot plants, using a watering can rather than a sprinkler to water the flowerbeds... There are a myriad of ways to "save" water that don't, really, have a massive impact on day to day life - but many people are too lazy or have the attitude "why should I bother when..."

I can't decide if this is a wind up too.

Water we drink and sea water is simply not the same. The water we drink comes from reservoirs. Sea water is from the sea and has a lot of salt in it which makes it undrinkable.

Wasted water does not go back into the reservoirs but ultimately ends up in the sea. Reservoirs generally get filled up when it rains...unless there's a drought then we nick it from rivers & lakes.

Seawater cannot be used as drinking water unless we desalinate it and quite simply we don't have any desalination plants because these are bloody expensive to run. Usually you find these in extremely hot countries like Saudi Arabia which is why they don't run out of water.

London water is recycled and it is clean when it comes out of the treatment plants.

The building of a desalination system in London is only attractive because London water are allowed to charge a rate of return on the investment which boosts profits but mending pipes is just a cost that reduces profits.

Regulation of water charges in the UK does not provide any incentive to reduce of leaks - hence we just keep building more reservoirs and other expensive schemes and then just push the water through ever more leaky pipes. Reducing leaks to 10% or less would dramatically reduce the amount of water shortages and obviate wasteful investment. I have an Israeli friend who is just astonished and bemused by UK 'water shortages'. As he says, it never stops raining in the UK.

The vast majority of water lost just leaks out before it gets to your house.

Desalinated water tasts quite hideous.
I was wondering what happened to the water used to cool nuclear generators. I read about one in Scotland, I think, where it has been closed because of jellyfish clogging the filters.
Presumably the water turns to steam but what happens then?

The water cools at the bottom of cooling towers and is then recirculated. The water that evaporates off as steam is replaced with more sea water - hence the blockage by jelly fish.

"waste water goes down the pipes and basically to waste water treatment plants, cleaned up, and put back in the clean water system."

No it's not.
Yes, most of it goes to sewage treatment plants, but most of those just output the water into rivers or outfall to the sea rather than treating it to drinking-water standards again. So you DO have to be careful with water.

The problem in Britain is that we're an island so much of the rain we get runs to the sea before we can use it or it can soak into the ground.
Of course any water that is used for gardens or street-cleaning or golf-courses is lost to the system and never even gets to a sewage works.

Another, more personal solution would for new houses to build in grey water harvesting/storage systems - ie. great big tanks under the ground to store rain water. This would be fine for flushing the loo, washing the car, watering the garden, etc, and would be another way of reducing pressure on drinking water supplies.

Re. nuclear cooling - if there's a big enough water supply (sea, lake, river), it is possible to cool it by running the water through with no recirculation - the volume of water is sufficient that the increase in temperature is considered small enough not to cause an environmental issue. Running this way is a lot more cost effective, and so the availability of a plentiful water supply is one of the biggest factors when considering where to site a reactor.

This thread is fascinating! Thanks OP!

Yes, most of it goes to sewage treatment plants, but most of those just output the water into rivers or outfall to the sea rather than treating it to drinking-water standards again. So you DO have to be careful with water

sewage treatment to the tertiary level makes the water clean enough to put back into rivers / resevoirs. From there it can be put through water treatment plants to make it clean enough to drink.
( i've learnt a lot about sewage treatment in the last hour or so!!)

Basically, the problem is not "wasting water". We have plenty of water in some form.

It's "wasting clean fresh water". We don't have enough of that and it's hard to make it.

Yes - but there's a lot of processing required to turn waste sewage into drinking quality water. All of which requires energy, and an investment in infrastructure.

Yes as everyone else said, the issue is that it wastes that water, that has taken god knows how much energy to clean and transport to your taps.

We are not connected to mains water or sewerage at home. We're on our own spring, which gets very slow in late summer, so we are super careful with water. Our toilets and washing machines all run off rain water we collect from the roofs of the house and barn, and bath water gets used on the plants rather than drained away.

Not being on mains drainage either really makes you think about how much goes out of the house as well as in - we are looking into reed beds for our grey water.

People are just so disconnected from water IMO - you turn a tap and hey presto! Its there. And then you pull a plug and its gone again. With nothing to show you what has gone into making that water available and how lucky we are to have it.

Not sure why the biscuits - this is an interesting thread IMO.

The OP did ask "AIBU to not understand how you waste water" - not "AIBU to waste water because I don't give a hoot".

Queen - I think too many people are too disconnected from many things atm. Examples that stick in my mind include:

• the woman who tried to sue a butcher who had a pig carcass in their window as "it caused emotional distress to her son", who seemingly hadn't made the connection to the bacon roll he'd happily eat.
• the children who thought the idea that potatoes grew under the ground was a joke
• the children who think "milk comes from Sainsburies" and didn't understand why foot-and-mouth might have implications for the dairy industry.

In many ways I do wonder if life is too easy atm - we don't need to spend time and effort growing food, or making products to barter for food, or carrying water 5 miles from the river every day. We go to the shop and can buy whatever we want, all ready washed and prepared and ready to put in the oven. We turn on the tap and the water comes out. We flick the switch and the light comes on. We don't need to think about how those resources become available for us. It means we can do many more things that we think we want to do - I'm not sure that's an entirely good thing.

V interesting thread :)

Maryz, surely the snow just melts and ends up in the rivers and reservoirs again?

Maryz, surely the snow just melts and ends up in the rivers and reservoirs again?

especially if the springs / smmers are supposedly getting hotter?

I explain these things at a very simple level to the children I work with from a very early age. I think an understanding of the 'inter-connectedness' of water, food, etc etc is really important.
Thank you for the thread and all the interesting answers.

Similar with petrol, the (eg) 8 Carbon molecules and 18 Hydrogen molecules will always be in the earth's ecosystem, but as a petrol component they are running a bit low. So it makes sense to save as much as possible.

If we have today the same amount of water on Earth as when the dinosaurs were around... where did all the water on Mars go to?