Saltwater?

"According to the International Desalination Association, in 2009, 14,451 desalination plants operated worldwide, producing 59.9 million cubic meters per day, a year-on-year increase of 12.3%.^[4] The production was 68 million m³ in 2010, and expected to reach 120 million m³ by 2020; some 40 million m³ is planned for the Middle East.^[5] The world's largest desalination plant is the Jebel Ali Desalination Plant (Phase 2) in the United Arab Emirates."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination

I can see the headlines now: "It's time to stop global salting".

Actually, the municipal water system I'm on here in Goergia, and likewise the muni water I was on when I lived in Florida, were never 'softened' - not by the counties and not by me. The water is only mildly 'hard'. That's 30+ years of not needing to 'soften' my water. I believe that's true, too, for most people in both states, though I suppose there are some who want zero hardness and have softening systems.

You've got some interesting points, but I'm not clear on the exact question.

Salt is corrosive, so we can't simply use it to flush toilets or whatever. The only salt I use is for a bit of seasoning in cooking (though I try to avoid such because of the link to blood pressure). Dishwashrs are an idle waste of time and money.

My house is a stones throw from the sea, but I don't harvest it for flushing the *** because a pee costs about 1p (Brit currency).

There is terrible waste of water, but in this country it's mainly from leaking pipes (before it reaches anyone's house).

The topic is interesting, but in order to keep it defined can you phrase it in one line ?

I don't want to divert the topic, but is it not a greater problem that some people lack water, saline or not ? On top of that, many people live in areas where drinking available water would be much the same as killing oneself.

That may have missed your point - I'd be grateful if you would narrow it down a bit.

I think the OP has some important points.

.

Here in the US, as in many '1st World' societies, we have institutionalized some very foolish water use rituals.

.

Using water, that is managed to be potable, to flush the toilet is ridiculous. That however is just the tip of the iceberg.

Many places use potable water to water their yard. A yard which often contains an assortment of non native species which require an inordinate amount of water in excess of rainfall to survive.

.

Often the local bureaucracy not only encourages water waste, but discourages alternatives that reduce potable water use.

It is pretty common for water utilities to reduce a water bill if the water was used for something like filling a pool, or if a leak was not found in a timely fashion. But the water is still no longer available in the system.

More disturbing is the significant resistance in some places to taking steps to reduce potable water usage. Zoning often has their heels dug in concerning things like grey water systems. When pushed, a concern over someone in a home accidentally ingesting the non-potable water.....but that too is absurd.

If I am using rain water, or post shower water, or laundry water to flush my toilet; someone who for whatever reason decides to down a cup of my toilet water is unlikely to be at as much hazard as someone who decides to down a cup from some normally plumbed toilet in a home here the owner insists on using tidybowl to make the water blue.

.

A previous commenter suggested that sea water could not be used to flush, being too corrosive. I don't think it would really be that much of problem.

Sea water can also be used for other significant uses. In Key West, the former home of Hemingway has a pool that circulated salt water from the ocean. The system has been in use for decades, and it doesn't require the addition of chemical chlorine.

.

Another comment was made that few people have access to water, saline or not. While water shortages exist and are likely to increase, saline figures into this equation. It wouldn't help to provide sea water to someone dying of thirst.

.

"Water, water, everywhere,And all the boards did shrink;Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to drink."

-Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

You forgot one thing in your thought process. If we introduce salt into the waste stream what happen to the biological matter that breaks down our waste. These waste treatment plants are now producing Methane which is pumped it to the gas system. Also the solids are used for fertilizer. We can't be dumping salt on the fields we grow are crops on. So that whole process would have to be changed.

Even if we chose to use an alternative non-potable fresh or salt water system. It would still need to be treated to remove bacteria in it. If not you may find a lot of sick people. The water in your crapper is exposed to the interior of your home. You want to breath any hazards that are in it? You want to expose small children to one more hazard? I think most of us as a small child when mom or dad wasn't looking, explored that little pool of water.

The use of drinking water for what you call a waste is a sanitation issue. To me sanitation is not a waste.

You beat me to the punch on that one, but there are quite a few more things too far "out-of-the-box" on this one. There is no current nationwide delivery system, or local dispersal method for accomplishing this; and, certainly no easy, and especially no affordable way to put any of that in place. The cost of the necessary materials alone would be prohibitive. So! I guess that means, that our current administration would think it is an absolutely wonderful idea, and mandate it forthwith!

It does make sense that we can't use salt water that will be flushed down the toilet. And of course it won't do much good on the lawn.

.

I still think it is a far better option for something like a hot tub or pool...IF it is locally available and returnable...as in coastal communities.

.

I think the idea that we must flush with drinking water is an example of conditioned mysophobia , the result of decades of effective marketing by the cleaning products industry.

.

The same companies probably sell tons of cat litter....advocating having in your home and handling feline excrement.

Which is likely to present more biological hazard; rainwater flushing your toilet, or a cat walking across your table after visiting the litter box?

.

Children are going to be exposed to far worse than rain water or laundry water, or even the reclaim water used around here (only out of spec of phosphates and nitrates, and you still can't use it to flush). That can actually be a good thing since immune systems develop resistance to things to which they are exposed in small amounts (but not to things to which they are not exposed).

.

No I am not advocating negligent or purposeful exposure of children to harmful biological agents. I am advocating the realization that water commonly exists in a state that is safe for purposes other than drinking without adding something like chlorine bleach.

.

By the way, there are plenty of more harmful liquid in the house than rainwater, laundry water, reclaim water, etc.... Unsupervised children could conceivably access these too, but there are no legal barriers to bringing those into the home on the belief that parents supervision is insufficient.

I do believe the OP was advocating using salt water to save our fresh water reserves. Many of which may non-potable. Which can be made so. These stores of fresh water what ever they are can change.

Here all our drinking water comes from rain fall. Collected in lakes. Rain water can wash contaminates into a lake. So now we would have to monitor these contaminates. Sediment needs to taken into consideration or over time it would clog the pipes as it settles out. So it would have to be filtered.

All this is in place other than the added treatment to insure it's drinkable. Mysophobia or not sounds like a great expense which would not reduce the amount of fresh water we flush down the commode.

You can't 'filter' oout something which is dissolved.
Del

Reverse Osmosis (RO) is a form of filtration, and it does filter out larger ions and molecules of dissolved matter.

Study up on gray water usage....

Personally I am doing everything I can to free up that 2% in the glaciers.

Melting a gallon of water takes less effort and resources than filtering it. Heck melting is practically free if you get the environment to do the work for you!

Water softeners don't put salt into our drinking water. What they do is exchange the sodium cation from the salt for a "hard" cation that must later be regenerated out by salt. As a result of this the corrosive chloride ion goes down the drain with the regeneration, while the heart attack enhancing sodium goes into our water.

sorry I haven't had a chance to reply. I"m a single dad with five kids 3 at home,i would say on average washing dishes ,doing laundry taking showers, flushing toilets, we use a couple of hundred gallons of water a day.About eight gallons of that a day is drinking the water.Tthat means 98% of the water we use goes down the drain.

Personally I believe that boiling salt water would have the same effect of killing disease and micro organisms as it does fresh water. I also have no problem with using potable water for watering our grass, goes back in the ground very easy for mother nature to filter back in to the aquifer. So water jugs for cooking and drinking and treated salt water for all that goes down the drain and that drain water goes back to the sea at a rate ,03 % we have 97 percent delusion and all so;ids removed and treated through cesspool. Human impact from house hold water use would be about 3% of what it is currently is which gives our water tables as it refers to human use a 97% INCREASE and if manufactures could work this in to there manufacturing plants those 900,000,000.00 with out drinking water may have a chance imagine the level of our fresh water tables then we would be saying what drought.............flip the scrip 95% of our drinking water is destroyed everyday multiple times before it gets back to mother nature doing its job I imagine she'd appreciate it.....No questions just conversation.

When I visited Los Angeles a few years ago the county was installing a 2nd system of water pipes so that people could flush toilets and water grass more cheaply with treated waste water. It's usually clean enough to drink, but guaranteeing that would be expensive. Previously the county dumped all this mostly clean water in the ocean. Putting salt water in those new pipes would preclude irrigation and most industrial uses. It would also corrode existing metal pipes, such as the cast iron pipes still used in most sewer systems; furthermore, even if salt-tolerant bacteria could be found (or engineered) to replace the bacteria currently used in waste-treatment plants, the sludge could no longer be used as fertilizer.

Getting salt water, or any other less-treated supply into houses would mean duplicating the piping infrastructure - and massive expense! Tap water is still cheaper than bottled, even taking into account the other uses for the remainder which is not drunk or cooked with.

No change in infastru,ture just just cha.ge the water from fresh to treated saltwater.The saving of95% of the fresh water thats currently flushed down the drain. trillion of gallons of freshwater saced each day replenishing our aquaferrs is worth the slight inconve.iance of buying drinking water .Witch shoud lower in price at roughly the same rate our aquafers will berefilled trillions of gallons a day.We use reclamed watee here in fort myers to water our grass and wash our cars.Its a social change buying drinking water buy tge gallon and flushing saltwater down our drains.There by keeping our aquafers full making farmers happy maybe enabling them enough to grow enough food to feed the starving in the world Just a thought.

For our family, that would double our expenditure as the cost of maintaining the current piped supply would still be there,and the additional expenditure for not just drinking water, but also for cooking & washing dishes would amount to the same again. I suppose that makes us lucky in Scotland, having so much rain and plenty of lochs to store it in!

Then the current system - which is designed for potable water - would have to be made more robust to deal with salt water. Leaks would kill off most types of land-based plants. Valves would corrode more quickly, so maintenance costs would rise.

If salt water is to be used - and it will be required in many places - then desalination is the less expensive, less risky method.

Reclaimed water can be from several sources - from rain run-off to the wet output of the sewage works. (I know of power stations in the UK where final treated water from the sewage works is their main source of process water)

Just a thought,barges that extract saltwater just below the surface of the sea which is in abundance,cost of water zilch cost is in the system to make it potable for house hold use. Potable meaning not drinkable but plenty safe to maintain all house hold duties including cleaning dishes. I had a salt water swimming pool that i added 50 to 100 pounds of salt to every month it had a system that used charged plates that turned the salt water in to chlorinated water. Pumped saltwater in to barges, i.e desalinization plants. That have open boilers in there hulls with a frame ceilings that catches the steam/ fresh water runs down ceiling to the side walls into storage tanks that are pumped into clean storage tanks to be transported to land i.e municipal water tanks. With no real equipment taking up space on the barges decks hybrid electrical generation can be utilized to produce the energy necessary to pump the water and boil it for desalinization by product sea salt in bottom of boilers. A barge deck full of solar panels and wind mills no diesel on those barge plants get the picture.

Solar and wind power would not be enough, as they are not reliable 24/7 providers. Fuel and the tankers would be too expensive for economic use.

Possibly with wave &/or current power, and using RO, then pipe to land.

The main point is that once enough treatment has been applied to make the system reliable and safe (not carrying disease, not going to fill with sediment, low salt levels for agricultural use), the further steps to make it fit to drink are minimal, and add a tiny fraction to the overall cost. Why take the risk to provide a more expensive system?

Do not forget wave and tidal as sources for power which are 100% reliable and not subject to clouds or wind lulls

wave &/or current

I didn't - But I suppose the terminology may have been missed.

Placing the system in an estuary would give regular flow, and there would not be too much salt either.

Well mainly,it doesn't make any sence to me that 95% of our house hold water use goes down the drain.Almost 1billion people dont evem have access to clean drinking water.The most important resource we have gets deficated on atleast one time a daythe other 6billion of us take for granite turnimg on our taps flushong our toilets washing our close and dishes,all thes things can be done with treated salt water. This conversation 100 years from know with 11 billion people on the planet .It would be to late imagine just using this treated water for in manufacturing, and house hold uae our aquafers would always be full our farms would always be producing cant feed the starving with out water.Not using salt water to releave the stress on our most important resource doesn,t make any sence.......sorry about the misspelling keyboard to small fingers to big on my smart phone lol.

Well, what would happen with the water and where would it go after it was used?

There are a number of things to worry about, some small like redesigning toilets so the salt won't corrode the metal components, others larger like the fact that salt water probably wouldn't be overly popular for bathing and would not meet consumer standards for washing clothes.

My feeling is that at the end of the day efficient processes and "grey water" recycling will be far more feasible AND economical- especially for those of us who live over 1,000 miles from the ocean.

Hold on! What does 70% of the earth's surface have to do with anything. You can't then subtract the 3%. The math is all messed up.

As to the physical problem, nature distills the salt water in the ocean by evaporation and condensation as rain. So the trick is not using it faster than it is being made.

wow so 70% of the earth is covered by water,what math is messed up?3% percent of the water is fresh water 1% is what we have access to and do our best to deplete or pollute.

wow so 70% of the earth is covered by water,what math is messed up?
Suppose the oceans were 7 times as deep as they are, and only covered 10 percent of the earth's surface, still containing the same amount of water (10=70/7). Should you subtract 3% from 10%?
I'm just arguing that the 70% number is irrelevant. I do agree that fresh water is a limited resource and we should use it wisely. The sun will only give us so much for free. If we use it faster than the sun can distill it, we have to make it ourselves the hard way.

Relevant in this context 70% we are all virtually surrounded by or in fairly close proximity to access saltwater that we can distill flush down our drains let mother nature purify and relieve some of the pressure we as humans impose on our fresh water resources salt water virtually free for the taking.Furthermore if we flipped the scrip and use salt water for all our water use impacting our saltwater recourse at about a 1/2 percent theoretically speaking.

In future there can be discretion for flush out lines and other uses.

For flushing out uses mere primary treatment and disinfection being sufficient.

Waste water recycling will become mandatory in all institutions, where one can have the diversified option of minimum treated flush water use & recovered other uses, but it is wiser to go for discharge into aquifers for agricultural usage than direct drinking / bathing uses.

Days are not far off to the fact that, just like state owned drinking water distribution, waste water board will also become operational handling combined sewage & trade waste waters for safe end uses & recycling.

We have made the scheme more attractive by way of introduction of hybrid ETP with Hydro power generation facility, using our artificial high head formation technology, offering hydro electric power generation for electrical desalination, as well as selling surplus power generated to grid for consumption, the plant employing at least 50 plus employees as well make revenue to the plant / board.

We all seem to be missing what our forefathers knew well- In any return of water to the earth the soil filters out most of the contaminants, either by chemical reaction of just plain filtering, and mother nature reactions do the rest so 90% of water returning to the aquifers is purified- This is where modern technology and real estate greed has screwed up the water supply- when a housing development is put in place up to 70% of the recharge area is lost to house site, roads, driveways, sidewalks etc and the run off normally is directed to a sewage or waste water system- usually which discharges miles away- hence the local aquifers are being depleted and the water is not purified by nature-just goes into rivers and lakes leading to the ocean, even the old fashioned septic system works better for the environment than modern sewage technology. We also forget that almost all the contaminants we put in the water originally came from the earth, just in a more concentrated form.Sadly politicians and even some scientists do not comprehend this. Note also when water freezes it expands and occupies more space- so land based melt systems (such as Glaciers and artic Ice) add less water to the Oceans than the normal volume they occupy

'....so land based melt systems (such as Glaciers and artic Ice) add less water to the Oceans than the normal volume they occupy....'

.

Whoa!

.

First: 'Arctic Ice' (at least the vast majority of it) is not 'land based'.

.

Second: ice that is supported by land and not in the ocean, which then melts, draining into the ocean; will add a volume of water to the ocean that exceeds the volume of ocean it previously occupied (because that volume was zero).

.

Third: any ice floating in the ocean will occupy (the amount at or below the water line) a volume of the ocean equal to an equal mass of sea water in which it floats.

Neglecting mixing/dilution for analytical ease, as long as the melted ice does not sink (and it shouldn't, as it is less dense) then the amount of seawater it displaces should be the same.

.

So in each case, the volume added to the ocean is not less than the volume of ocean previously occupied.

.

I guess you could have been referring to the amount of air occupied....but why?

You are correct, but one thing I noted not mentioned, is the fact as global warming melts the ice, and adds land based water volumes to the ocean (with a small volume change as Ice is less dense)- the increase in temperature causes more evaporation so the increase may not be as bad as feared- I have not seen any commentary or numbers on the evaporation loss volumes

I think some people need to familiarize themselves with the global water cycle and its actual numbers.

We humans may all just survive on a drop in a bucket equivalent to the worlds water supply but that bucket holds some 332.6 million cubic miles of water!

I think that world wide average evaporation of ocean water and the recondensation into fresh water rates are estimated to be around 200 - 300 trillion gallons per 24 hour period. From that each of us 7 billion humans would get about 28,000 - 44,000 gallons of fresh water per day. That's about 5 - 9 large semi tanker truck loads per person every single day.

One again I am getting the impression that the limited fresh water problem is largely politics, logistics, living practices (lots of people in a small area, IE cities) and lack of knowledge related.

While your figures may be correct (they are certainly in the ball park), industrial use is around four times domestic use.

We also need to ensure rivers do not run dry, and all the wild animals and plants need their share, too.

As for population locations and density, you are spot on - Birmingham (UK) took steps over a hundred years ago to ensure they had a water supply for their growing population by buying some lakes in the Welsh mountains and building dams and a 73 mile long aqueduct. Only recently has there been a requirement to supplement the city's supply as is has over two million inhabitants.