"Wasting Water" Presumably, the same water has been,in one form or another, on the planet forever: ice caps, drank and peed out by dinosaurs, swum in by fish, etc. No new water is made. So where does all this "wasted water" go? Is it really "wasted"?
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MG1942 Has a Life Penguin
ANSWERS: 4
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I think you miss the point. Less than 1 percent of all water on Earth is available as groundwater and surface water suitable for human uses such as drinking and cooking. The remainder is either salt water (97 percent) or is locked up in ice (just over 2 percent). For more than a billion people in developing countries, water is scarce and frequently contaminated, thereby posing a health risk. In these parts of the world, contaminated drinking water along with primitive (or nonexistent) sanitation systems annually result in widespread illness and millions of deaths annually. The majority of the victims are children. precipitation, which replenishes groundwater and surfacewater resources, does not fall evenly over the face of the Earth. Additionally, some times of the year are rainy, other times dry. Thus, water resources are bountiful at some times and in some places, but extremely sparse in others. It's about wasting this fresh, clean, drinkable water, which in most of the world is a scarce and precious resource, that the term refers to. http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Da-En/Drinking-Water-and-Society.html
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If fresh water becomes salt water, then it is wasted. It's a very difficult process to turn salt water into water that you can drink.
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I once visited a community in the desert right in the Pacific coast that had to live from evaporating salt water into freshwater tanks I learned how valuable water is.... they could not afford to waste any fresh water so they would recycle it in many ways over and over from humans, animals, plants, etc. Saltwater was used for the rest: showers, cleaning dishes, some crops, etc.
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"Wasting water" is a shorthand for "Wasting safe, fresh water". The oceans have more water than we can possibly use. But (a) it is salty, and (b) it is down there, not up here.
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