What Happens to Water Going Down the Drain

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Last week, peer-to-peer network CurrentTV invited us to participate in their Earth Week special, where they asked their readers to pose their most burning eco-questions to a handful of savvy bloggers. We’ve been thinking a lot about the state of the world’s water lately, so this question stood out to us:

It’s always considered a major no-no to waste water. But how is water used in a household wasted? Isn’t it all just processed and reused?

I understand that there is energy spent in processing and there are possible chemical issues in the cleaning process but I’m really just interested in the whole concept of “wasting water”.

What percentage of water that goes down the drain is actually lost forever?

– Jakebot

Great question, Jake. We want to answer this question for you in two parts: simple and not so simple. First, the simple answer to your question is zero. Zero percent of water that goes down the drain is actually lost forever because, according to the law of conservation of mass, matter cannot be created or destroyed.

But what you want to know, then, is, ‘why is wasting water is such a big no-no?’ The answer to that is cost and location. In the United States, most people get their water from wells or from municipal systems. Once they’ve used it, most people send their “waste” water down the drain to either the wastewater treatment plant or to a septic system. It is costly — in terms of both money and energy — to transport water from its source to our houses, and to treat it once it leaves our houses.

Location is a big deal when it comes to water. If you live in Seattle, like we do, it’s plentiful enough that we don’t need to worry too much about wasting it because there is always enough for all of us to use as we please. But in most places, water still goes through a natural cycle — either evaporating or soaking into the ground — before being taken back into the municipal system. So in cities that suffer from drought, there is not enough water in the public system for everyone to use all they want, all the time, and it becomes even more apparent why sourcing water from a reservoir many miles from your home, and flushing it to a location just as far away, is a massive dedication of resources for a system that could be handled more locally.

The costs of operating these systems are growing every year. As Carol Steinfeld, author and founder of Ecovita told us (we asked for her input to help answer your question), “we have more people on the planet, each using more and more water, than ever before in human history.” So, to provide the basic human right of clean water for all, it becomes imperative that we get more efficient at using our water. When you think about it that way, it seems very wasteful to use clean drinking water to wash our cars water plants, or spray the sidewalks — when water re-used once, twice or even three times from relatively clean places like the shower, the sink or the washing machine, would work just as well without requiring nearly as much energy.

Making our water systems more efficient means we need to implement some of our more innovative solutions to reusing and treating our water at the source, such as the super-treatment facilities in San Diego, home rainbarrels, or even Steinfeld’s waterless toilets. If we can get better at cutting the external cost of providing clean water — treatment and transport — then we can build a system where water isn’t waste, but a resource.

Excerpted from Worldchanging.