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Steve Mills
Steve Mills and his wife have one daughter. They previously owned two coffee/ice cream shops, currently operate an internet sales company and teach classes, but his primary job involves the paper industry worldwide. Hobbies and interests lie in gardening, photography, recorded music and of course, their pets.
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Does water ever really disappear?

Posted Saturday, March 5, 2016, at 1:26 PM
Does water escape the earth's atmosphere?

An ad on the Super Bowl started me thinking again about a question I've had for many years. When I use water, be it in the kitchen, bathroom, garden, or drink, does the world actually lose that water or i9sn't it just being recycled?

I realize that it is always good to conserve any treated or processed water. There was an expense to that and it is wasteful to lose, but when it rains, is that water not coming from somewhere else?

Was it not in some other underground aquifer, some stream, some ocean, maybe even some water treatment plant?

So when we are told to not waste water, and to think of other parts of the world who are hurting for water, even the West Coast, are we actually withholding it from some other area that needs it? Just wondering.

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  • I can see the next billion dollar grant from the government. Track water molecules to see where they go.

    Find a way to mark water molecules coming from a faucet in Tennessee, on in Maine, Florida, Texas, California and Montana with a unique marker and see when and where it re-surfaces.

    Does my water go into a plant,evaporate and get picked up by the wind to be deposited as rain in Massachusetts, England, Russia. Am I drinking water that came from the Alps or China?

    -- Posted by stevemills on Sat, Mar 5, 2016, at 1:26 PM

  • Or soaked into our bodies....we are like 70ish water I've always heard!

    -- Posted by chefgrape on Sun, Mar 6, 2016, at 2:48 PM

  • Water can be created and destroyed. You can create water by losing weight... The energy in fat is stored in the form of triglycerides. Triglycerides are made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. To lose 1 pound of fat, you must breathe 2.9 pounds of oxygen. The combustion of the triglyceride to produce energy also creates 2.8 pounds of carbon dioxide, and 1.1 pounds of water. So, losing 7.5 pounds of fat will produce a gallon of water, and increase the greenhouse gases by 21 pounds....

    I am doing my part to combat global warming. (smiley face)

    -- Posted by lazarus on Sun, Mar 6, 2016, at 8:46 PM

  • I've often wondered the same thing, especially when I'd hear how we need to conserve water. I always though, heck, this planet is covered mostly with water, we have plenty! (Because, of course, al that salt water CAN be converted to fresh water if needed.)

    The issue with water conservation is, as I understand it, that cleaning the fresh water we have now takes time and sometimes money. And we're reaching the tipping point where there are too many people using our fresh water and we cannot clean it or desalinate it fast enough to keep up with the demand.

    Like I said, cleaning takes time and desalinizations takes time and money.

    So, I don't know if water disappears as much as it changes form, but our ability to cheaply and quickly clean our water is in peril. So I try to turn off the faucet more than I used to. Monitor yourself for a day and see if you're not guilty, as I was, of letting water run far longer than it needs to.

    -- Posted by ClarkDV on Wed, Apr 13, 2016, at 9:04 PM

  • Good point, what does it take to get it back into the palatable and safe stage.

    My worst time is brushing my teeth. I continuously catch myself letting it run, although I have it turned low. I conserve in hotel rooms as well.

    Doesn't matter where I am, but I was always talking back to some of these ads saying, "but, but.... that does not make sense.

    -- Posted by stevemills on Thu, Apr 14, 2016, at 8:18 AM
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