How are you "wasting water" when you leave your faucet running?

This is a pretty simple one. If you live in a drought affected area, then you are obviously wasting limited water resources. If you don't, then you are wasting the fuel it takes to treat water municipally and pump to your house, or pump water from your well to your faucet. It is wasteful in all cases, mostly of fuel..

To the guy who says he chops his own wood and has a well so therefore has a sustainable life style... how does that well water get to your faucet (pump, electricity, fuel). How do you collect the wood, chainsaw (fuel), logsplitter (fuel), vehicle to transport from tree site to home (fuel). Nobody chops down trees with an axe and carries the wood from the forest to a house, so all of our behaviors have an impact and we should be mindful of waste in everything we do.

Peace.

I posted this while sitting on the can.

Hey all you water treatment workers posting on this thread, Im sending you a little present. Cheers.

Number 2 wrote:

I posted this while sitting on the can.

Hey all you water treatment workers posting on this thread, Im sending you a little present. Cheers.

You do know that water treatment and wastewater treatment are two different things and two different plants, don't you?

Liberals don't waste anything, they even drink their own pee, it's called urotherapy.

Number 2 wrote:

I posted this while sitting on the can.

Hey all you water treatment workers posting on this thread, Im sending you a little present. Cheers.

.

We work in a Water Treatment facility. Not a WASTE Water Treatment facility. Two entirely different things. With two different purposes. I will never see anyone's s**t.

But thanks for trying.

TomHurtins wrote:

HardLoper wrote:

People are always telling me not to leave the faucet on for 10 seconds yet they take 10 minute long hot showers. Just another liberal environmentalist campaign to make you feel guilty about modern technology instead of enjoying it. Our city has wasted $50B on a light rail that serves almost no one, so I'm pretty sure we can afford some desalination plants if we ever have a drought.

Really have something against liberals? They're not letting you enjoy modern technology? Oh wait, who are the ones making the largest advancements in science and technology again?

This is one of the most asinine statements on LRC yet. It is like counting the prevalence of right-handedness amongst physicians and saying right-handedness confers the intellect and skills necessary to be a physician, since most physicians are right-handed.

Start a thread on letsrun about brain surgery and suddenly all of the brain surgeons appear. Start a thread on water treatment and suddenly all of the municipal water treatment plant workers magically appear. I love letsrun!

Even if it doesn't waste water, letting it run is wasteful because of the environmental impacts and energy inputs to bring it to the faucet.

Lack of systems thinking here by almost everyone except the few who mentioned the lost negative entropy. Also the water treatment guys who are implicitly referring to this, of course.

Let's say there are absolutely ideal conditions and the water is 100% recycled. Sure, the water itself is fully conserved, but that's just a partial view of everything that's going on. If you're focusing only on that, you're missing the bigger picture.

The energy to pump the water out, treat it, and/or recycle it is lost forever in the form of negative entropy (energy dissipated), as one poster mentioned — second law of thermodynamics. So using water you don't need is still wasteful, it's just the waste comes in a different form. The second law comes into play in any kind of resource use. Something is always lost to entropy in transforming the resource from one state to another (using it).

When a physics guy interprets the industry employed.

Post Hole Digger wrote:

Number 2 wrote:

I posted this while sitting on the can.

Hey all you water treatment workers posting on this thread, Im sending you a little present. Cheers.

You do know that water treatment and wastewater treatment are two different things and two different plants, don't you?

I peed in the sink. Coming your way.....

Number 1 wrote:

Post Hole Digger wrote:

You do know that water treatment and wastewater treatment are two different things and two different plants, don't you?

I peed in the sink. Coming your way.....

Nope. That's the same pipe as the toilet.

Trying peeing into the river or lake near the water plant intake. It's been done. But also note that the plants have cameras monitoring the area around the intake.

The water treatment guys are the ones that put the lead, flouride, chlorine and arsenic in your water . The waste water treatment folks are the ones the try to take the crap out.

one-hundred four-hundred wrote:

This is one of the most asinine statements on LRC yet. It is like counting the prevalence of right-handedness amongst physicians and saying right-handedness confers the intellect and skills necessary to be a physician, since most physicians are right-handed.

Political views are directly comparable with which hand is more dominant? That may be a crazy statement(probably a troll), but your response and analogy is one of the worst I've ever heard. Political views are not chosen at a young age such as hand dominance. They are based off of facts, critical thinking, reason, and many other factors.

Also…. wrote:

The water treatment guys are the ones that put the lead, flouride, chlorine and arsenic in your water . The waste water treatment folks are the ones the try to take the crap out.

I do hope you are joking because no part of that makes any sense.

matter can neither be created nor destroyed.so, if you die and decompose into soil and organic matter, you still take up the same amount of space on earth as you did when you were a human.it takes more time to decompose a human body though, just as it does for water to get back into the ground....and humans use the water faster than it percolates back into the natural water tables....so they dry up, sometimes foreverthe only thing different for me between you and water, is that I care about water.

conservation of mass wrote:

I have been told that it is wasteful to let water from the faucet run down the drain. Can someone explain this?

The water comes out of the ground, then eventually makes it to my faucet before running down my drain. Once the water runs down my drain, it goes through the sewage treatment plant, then gets dumped into a local creek and ultimately ends up going back down into the ground.

So the water started in the ground, and ends up back in the ground, but somehow has been waisted in the whole process?

matter, not mass wrote:

matter can neither be created nor destroyed.

It can be converted into energy however and those energy particles can leave our system taking that 'mass' with them.

In many places potable water is a major consumer of energy. That is another factor. The engineer had it right, though. Read up on water infrastructure, as well as groundwater and surface water systems and how they interact with land use. Again, you'll answer your own question.

I just sent you guys some presents too. Looks like I had some corn recently.