What are the wisest ways to reduce the environmental consequences of water consumption?

Question

What are the wisest ways to reduce the environmental consequences of water consumption?

Answer 1

Minimise how much you use flushing the toilet (a brick or glass of water as suggested).

Watch how much washing we do, of both clothes and dishes. We can do this by only cleaning things that need to be cleaned, not just for the sake of it.

Everyone should have their own wells, not transport water from areas miles away. This might encourage people to spread where there are resources for living.

Re-use rainwater from our rooves instead of letting it go down the drain, and straight into the gutter. this can be used for gardening, etc when needed, but is probably perfectly good to drink.

There are many, and these are just a few. One of the obvious ones of course is just to have less consumption. This has an immediate effect on the environmental consequences. But do we achieve that with less people?

Answer 2

dont water your grass

Answer 3

There are few consequences of water consumption that we want to change. We do need to stay hydrated, keep waste products flushed through kidneys and bowels. We even need to sweat.

So one thinks you must mean wasting water instead of consuming it. The problems we create in non-consuming water would involve polluting it, leaving in it materials used in washing, or the materials washed out. Historically we have attempted to minimize the impact of that by greater levels of dilution.. more water gives less pollution per litre.

This approach assumes that one intends to leave the pollutants in the water. The alternative is to leave the pollutants as concentrated as possible, by using a minimum of water, and then extract the pollutants from the water. This strategy does lead to greater efforts to minimize the amounts of polluting materials that get into the water, preferring non-aqueous cleaning.

We have cases of water used just for cooling. Now water used for cooling can be ponded, and reused for cooling, reused for most any purpose if the cooling leaves it clean. But of course, we need to take every effort to keep it clean.

Water used to fill swimming pools has not yet been lost, but when we add lots of chlorine, it is.

Better to use an ozonator to preserve both the atmosphere and the water.

We use a tremendous amount of water to transport our f***s and urine to treatment plants where the plant nutrients (pollutants) are allowed to carry on downstream. We extract useless sludge with toxic residues and offer it as a soil amendment. Better we should never have used that water, leave the f***s and urine in a compact form so that its spontaneous heating can sterilize it, and the plant nutrients returned to feed farm crops rather than flow downstream to the next water intake.

Irrigation water can be necessary to feed us, but using irrigation on lawns does not appear to be necessary. Further, it can sink into the soil and bring up salts that can kill lawns or plants downstream. Restrict irrigation to food production. (I include food for animals.) But also avoid using flood irrigation because of salination problems.

Water not used but allowed to pass over land that has excess plant nutrients or other contaminants should be ponded to reclaim as much as possible.

Answer 4

Water recycle..

Answer 5

Have everyone fill a glass jar with water and put in in your toilet tank.  Make sure it does not interfere with the moving parts in the tank.