5 ms·
At what cost? Desalination is not cheap in terms of the energy it uses or even the environmental cost of what to do with the left over brine. We can certainly
by VBprogrammer 7y ago
At what cost? Desalination is not cheap in terms of the energy it uses or even the environmental cost of what to do with the left over brine.
We can certainly be less wasteful at home. Flushing toilet waste with potable water and even to some extent using potable water to bath in are incredible wastes of a precious resource.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoThe vast majority of water use is agriculture. Skimping in your home doesn't change that.
- VBprogrammer 7y agoTo be honest I suspected that and was going to say something about it but then I tried to verify my suspicion and couldn't immediately find a reference for it. From what I did see about 50% of domestic use is watering plants. Getting rid of conventional lawns would be a good start.
- Scoundreller 7y agoDepends how you do it. My mom’s backyard is going from useless lawn to cares-for fruit/veg garden. Water consumption is going up. Dunno if our practices use less than buying what we produce.
- VBprogrammer 7y agoTo be fair the comparison isn't between growing your own and buying in a grocery store. If you get anything useful out of it then I think that's arguably a better use of water than a lawn.
- dbt00 7y agoThey’re trivial wastes of a precious resource. Toilet flushing isn’t a significant consumer of potable water, and retrofitting multiple municipal water lines is expensive for the benefit.
- RandallBrown 7y agoIsrael gets like half of their drinking water from desalination. With solar/wind/nuclear/tidal energy, it could be very inexpensive.
- ricardobeat 7y agoHandling the massive amounts of brine resulting from desalination could end up costing a lot. They’re already having issues with it.
- avip 7y ago80% (and counting)
- driverdan 7y agoIt's still not inexpensive. Desalination plants cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build.
- abraae 7y agoCan't the brine be dumped back into the sea somewhere, leaving net saltiness the same? I can see that dumping point would become clogged, but presumably that would be only a local environmental issue.
- lostapathy 7y agoHow does flushing my toilet from water drawn from a river ... and then pumped back into the same river slightly downstream hurt anything?
- VBprogrammer 7y agoThat water is cleaned to within an inch of its life. Pumped for miles and then treated before being returned to the river. The same goes for the gallons of water which is used for showering. Grey water could easily be reused for flushing or watering plants.
- Scoundreller 7y agoTechnically easy, but economically terrible if you bother with the permits, sign-offs and buying an approved system when you effectively can’t DIY. I’m waiting for WalMart or Amazon to sell an elegant $500 incinerating toilet and $500 gray water system that’s approved and just needs pipe/power connections. We have the tech to run homes without any sewer connections. Solutions right now seem to be priced/targeted at situations where buyers have no choice.
- lostapathy 7y agoWhen I use the sink now, the water ends up right where it started, and the next town downstream can use it too. If I watered plants and didn't let the water return to the river, the next town downstream wouldn't be able to do the same thing. For them, it's objectively better for me to send it back to the river than give it to the atmosphere via plants.
- quotemstr 7y agoWater doesn't just disappear when plants take it up by the roots.