Why wasting water is bad for the environment

This unsustainable practice decreases long term water security and availability. Furthermore, and almost most importantly, water takes a lot of energy, time, and money to filter and clean so that it's drinkable.

Wasting water or overusing household water means you're wasting the energy-intensive process of filtration. The many steps of this process--extraction, transportation, filtration, etc. This question originally appeared on Quora. Ask a question, get a great answer.

Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. More questions:. News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Fresh water is not a renewable resource. The reason to conserve water is as obvious as this.

We need water to survive. We need it not only to sustain us but our way of living. The food that we eat, the crops, the livestock, all depends on water to be viable for future consumption.

In the United States alone, half of all the water that the country has is used to raise animals. That means only half is for human consumption, some of which is not even for drinking.

Without enough water, we would have to focus on other sustainable food sources, like insects and bugs. While that is possible, it is always better to focus on what you can do to sustain our current way of living for the long haul. With water being scarcer, it becomes harder to produce certain commodities that need it.

As a consequence, certain commodities will become scarce or priced at higher rates. Water conservation means choosing the right options to reduce the use of water. The less we use water, the less money and energy we spend in processing and having it transported in our homes, hospitals, and other establishments. We have plenty of uses for freshwater other than drinking and bathing. In fact we're so bad at managing our freshwater resources that in the process we have created deserts, poisoned millions of hectares of land with salt and killed entire lakes — in some cases we are even making them disappear… have you read about the Aral Sea?

Not only is this all a monumental own goal; not only is this wiping out species; but millions of us humans are at the same time getting thirstier by the minute. And it doesn't end there. Mismanagement of freshwater resources is causing floods where there were never any floods, droughts where there never any droughts.

Take for example rivers: we dam them, divert them, and devalue them.