3 ms·

Are the 4 liters of water being shot out to space?

• corpMaverick 9y ago
  Neither in the case of Coca-Cola. Somebody is going to pee that back to the earth.
  • tetromino_ 9y ago
    And depending on the local geology, it will take anywhere between months and thousands of years for that ex-Coke to get to a water body, evaporate, precipitate, and infiltrate back into the aquifer. It's very easy for the rate of extraction of a particular aquifer to exceed the rate of replenishment. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_conductivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_conductivity water moves through porous material at rates varying from 300 m/day (mixture of gravel and sand) to 3 mm/day (clay, sandstone). EDIT: arithmetic.
• lholden 9y ago
  Waste water, unless the plant is specifically setup to recycle it's water waste, tends to eventually end up in the ocean. Dumping fresh water in the ocean is reasonably close to shooting it out into space. (Of course nature will reclaim it from the ocean for you over time.)
• mcguire 9y ago
  Commercial desalination is quite expensive. Natural desalination is quite slow and mostly inconvenient.