Using Water: What It Means

Water use is unique as an environmental issue because recycling is built into the system.  With water, we recycle whether we want to or not. Someone said that unless water leaves the planet, it is never wasted. That’s why saying that a reverse osmosis unit “wastes water” makes no sense. More correctly, a reverse osmosis unit uses water, much in the same way that a dishwasher or a lawn sprinkler uses water.  A reverse osmosis unit doesn’t send the water to Mars; it uses it to rinse away impurities, then sends it down the drain to be eventually reused. Maybe next week, maybe after a thousand years. That’s what your clothes washer does, but we seldom hear people denounce washing machines for “wasting” water.

With water, the issue is often more about saving energy than saving water, since using water usually also involves using energy. A Pacific Institute study on the environmental consequences of the bottled water consumption concluded that “bottled water is up to 2000 times more energy-intensive than tap water. Similarly, bottled water that requires long-distance transport is far more energy-intensive than bottled water produced and distributed locally.”  And we aren’t talking about small amounts of energy.  The Pacific study estimated that between 32 and 54 million barrels of oil were used in bottled water production, packaging and delivery in 2007 in the U.S. alone.

We now have 333,000,000 Americans sharing essentially the same amount of fresh water that was once shared by 4,000,000 Americans.  Although we aren’t sending any water to Mars, we’re overusing it to the point that we are disrupting natural cycles.  For example, we’re extracting ground water much faster than the natural process can replenish it and, as our generation has done with all our natural resources, we are stealing water from the future.  It’s no small thing when the Nestle Corp. pumps the groundwater supply of a small community dry in order to truck the water to remote points for sale at a markup of hundreds of times what they paid for it.  It will take generations for the natural hydrological cycle to restore the groundwater.  The short-sighted city council that sells water rights to meet its current expenses has stolen from the future.

Adapted from the Pure Water Occasional, July 20, 2009.

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