h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Going on a tangent from another thread, where people were talking about not flushing the toilet to save water.

The taps in my house are, ultimately, connected to a reservoir - a reservoir which never runs dry, even at the height of summer. Now, if I use less water, it doesn't, it seems to me, make any difference to anything. Yes, there might be a bit more water in the reservoir, but it never runs dry anyway. And while there have been water shortages here in recent years, it was because if leakage that occurred between the reservoir and people's homes. Using less water wouldn't have prevented those shortages.

So in such a situation, why is saving water important? I feel I must be overlooking something hiding in plain sight.

It never runs dry, I guess, because we maintain an emergency level of water. We divert it from other watercourses if it gets low, and that has an environmental impact we'd rather avoid.

On a small scale, and in an environment where engineers have rearranged nature's plans to give you running water, there isn't much you can do to affect things one way or the other.

The thing about using running water to flush away wastes is that it improves hygiene for people. Think of ancient cities that did not have this. Athens during the golden age of Greece, had perhaps 25,000 citizens. This was the the largest population that a city could safely provide for. Collecting rainwater and drilling wells were the main ways they had of getting water. If bodily wastes were allowed to contaminate those wells, there would likely be epidemics of nasty water-borne diseases that would thin the population back.

There might be as yet undiscovered methods of handling harmful wastes that do not use running water.

On a large scale, diverting water from rivers and storing it in reservoirs changes the distribution of lifeforms. Amphibians lose out because large bodies of water harbor permanent populations of larger fish that would gobble up pollywogs and tadpoles. Meanwhile, swamps [which contain vernal pools to breed in during the Spring and then dry up during the summer] are perpetually being drained for suburban developments. Frogs and toads eat a lot of mosquitoes, which can still breed in watering cans left out in suburban gardens, but the amphibians which exist to eat them, are no longer around. This means there must be spraying to kill the mosquitoes....

Frankly when it's tipping down outside and has been doing so for months I feel no guilt about running a tap.

If there is a drought THEN I'll apply saving notions to what I'm doing.

While your water supply might be sufficient today, government wants to know how little they can give you. They can then plan a future where your descendants are many more and governmental expenditures are minimal. Thus taxes will support the biggest government of the most people.

It turns out, that water is the most limiting resource for future plans to expand government. More people, more money, less water per capita.

Anyone who lives outside an area supplied by government
operated water distribution infrastructure likely uses a well.

I am among those and am very conscious of the limits which
I can put on my own pumped well system in dry seasons.

There is a common saying, among rural folk who depend
on wells, regarding toilet use: "If it's brown, flush it down,
but if it's yellow, let it mellow."


Like all conservation ideas, one has to slowly come to
the appreciation that while the efforts of any one person
or household may seem to be a drop in the ocean, the
cumulative effect in larger cities with populations
in the millions is exponential.

In a city of ten million, every extra daily flush means using
50 million extra gallons. Multiply that by the number of days
in the year and the figure soon gets into astronomical regions.

Like oil and coal and wood and other natural resources there is
a finite quantity of fresh water on the planet. And with more than
six billion people it is quite likely we will soon deplete this resource.
Six billion times five gallons is 30 billion gallons per day.

The ratio of fresh potable water to salted ocean water is
staggeringly small. Something like only 4% of the planet's
water is fit for human consumption and too large a proportion
of that is being 'wasted'.


~jwf~

But if I don't turn on the tap, the 'wastage' simply takes place in leakages further along the supply chain.

And while global figures are persuasive, my being parsimonious with water has literally zero benefit to the areas of the world where it's most lacking. It isn't like it's available there if I don't use it.

PS thanks for the mellow rhyme. It's a cast iron law of the Internet that *someone* has to come out with it during a discussion about water.

There are alternatives to water as a medium for disposing of human wastes. A shopping mall near me doesn't use water to flush its urinals. There's a rest room in a park on Cape Cod that used Abby Rockefeller's composting toilet, which had been invented in the 1970s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clivus_multrum

Please bear in mind that these are not the only potential options. Someone will surely invent other waterless systems sooner or later, particularly in areas like the U.S. Southwest where water is becoming scarcer and scarcer. There's a large aquifer under parts of Texas and Arizona. Because of this, there's not much incentive to avoid wasting water. The problem is that the aquifer is gradually drying up. What will people do when they can no longer fall back on it? Rich celebrities who can no longer fill their swimming pools will certainly raise a big stink.

The more I think about it, the more household water saving seems to be for the benefit of one's conscience more than the benefit of the planet. Being a vegetarian would probably be a more sensible way.

Good point, the water used to raise meat is vastly more than the water used to raise crops.

There are billions of vegetarians and semi-vegetarians in Asia. As they become Westernized, though, watch out! In Japan, young men with large appetites are becoming more common. If you increase per-capita meat consumption even a little bit for India and China, the meat has to come from somewhere, and is likely to raise prices for the whole global market.

It's nice if there are people in the West who wish to become vegetarians, thus offsetting the Asians who are eating more meat. The scale is all wrong, though. Every time one of the 2 and a half billion people in India and China eat an extra chicken leg, two and a half billion people elsewhere in the world have to eat one less chicken leg. Does the West contain 2 and a half billion people, though? Putting the populations of North America and Europe together, I come up with less than one billion. Africa has many millions who can barely find enough to eat as it is. When droughts afflict their farms, they tend to eat forage crops intended their cattle, and *some* of those crops cause paralysis in humans.

I wish people in the developing world didn't feel such an incentive to become Westernized.

I've now got an image of two-and-a-half billion chickens hopping everywhere.

It's not so much that you want to avoid wasting water, so much as conserving what you've got, to reduce your carbon footprint.I found this: "In the UK, we use approximately 150 litres of water per person per day in our homes. Our previous research indicates that when household and water company emissions are considered together, around 90% of these emissions (35 million tonnes CO2 per year) can be attributed to ‘water in the home’. This includes energy for heating water but excludes space/central heating. The remaining 10% of emissions originate from abstracting, treating and supplying water, and subsequent wastewater treatment."

I'd hazard a guess, though only a guess it be, that as for electricity consumption, the window of oppertunity for individual householders, in usage, to make any significent difference whatsoever, in usage/preservation, is utterly as near zero as makes no differnce, when its put alongside bisuness/commercial usage of either of them... Agricultural usage of water, and in bisuness has traditionally been very wasteful, though I know from work my Brother did a few years back, that some of them are actually attempting to reduce usage now, to an extent

Yes indeed; the point you are missing is not that so much that you will affect water levels (though increasing water stress, water shortages and even water wars are predicted for the the coming decades), but that the water that comes out of your tap or flushes your toilet has to be *very* expensively treated.

So regardless of how much it is raining outside and you feel that you live in a world of limitless water, you should conserve water because it costs millions of pounds/dollars and vast amounts of energy to treat sewage and return it clean to water courses, and to treat drinking water from reservoirs. It should be compulsory for all citizens to visit a water treatment works and see the scale of what goes on behind the scenes to provide clean water to the population.

During the UK's frequent drought orders, hosepipe bans do make a very real difference to reservoir levels. 2-legs is perhaps making the very common mistake of forgetting how a small action by an individual, when multiplied by a million people, makes a big impact. It's very easy to think that we can do what we like because big industry has a far bigger effect, but that is simply wrong. (remember there are around 7 billion of us thirsty humans on the planet who directly or indirectly rely on some form of treated water).

In many cases anyway, water-hungry industries such as paper mills, use 'grey' water or constantly recycle the water they use, so have little impact on drinking water supplies. Though of course abstraction by industry can have very dire effects on individual water -courses.; changing the local ecosystems, disrupting food-webs, etc.

Making a differnce to water levels, though, and actually making any differnce are two entirely differnt things...
I'm sure I recall from my Brother, when he was working in industry, a few years back, that domestic averaged out, worlwide, at about 5% to 10% of the usage of water (I.E., used directly in homes, rahther than inclucding, say, for example, water used in agriculture, which was used, via food eaten in homes), which I think was about the same level as for domestic direct electricity/power usage.
The problems isn't about shortages of water, where there is plenty, but shortages where there isn't any/much, and reducing usage in the former, just gives a greater excess of spare capccity in the former, useually without affecting the latter

>>water that comes out of your tap or flushes your toilet has to be *very* expensively treated.

Which is why I'd like to know the cost of washing things which need recycling, compared to the saving made by that recycling. The population should be advised to wash cans and glassware in rainwater, or "grey" water.

Indeed. Ideally every house and business would have two water inlets; one for drinking water and one sourced from non-treated water. But you can't retrospectively fit that.

We do (a lot of people don't realise) have two water *outlets* though. Water flowing from street drains (storm drains) bypasses treatment works and flows straight to the nearest river or water-course. Only domestically plumbed piping takes waste water and sewage to treatment plants.

There is no accurate estimate but many councils believe that vast numbers of properties have their plumbing incorrectly connected, taking dirty water such as from the kitchen sink and even the toilet into stormdrains

There is the occasional public information campaign to raise awareness but most people are still blissfully aware that one should *never* pour contaminated water and fluids such as paint, etc down outside drains. Even car-wash water should not be. It just goes straight into your nearest river