How much fresh water do you think we have bottled up?

I Googled this and came up empty (pardon the pun). The population of the planet is around 7 billion. We are all basically bags of water. The higher the population, the more fresh water is consumed. Of course most of that is recirculated by sweat/urine. Still, we retain a lot and it adds up. Add the huge amount of water we bottle up and store in warehouses. Whether for disaster or consumer consumption, it has to be a lot. Many factories have huge tanks of water that they use for production of their products. We have been seeing a lot of sink holes of late. Maybe no more than normal. It may well be that the information age is responsible for it being more common to see. Maybe we are just using way too much, or storing too much and creating some of these sinkholes.

Anyway, what percentage of fresh water do you think we have bottled up? Is this something being studied? Should we not be building more desalinisation plants?

reply to post by jimmiec


OP,

This is a serious question, which requires serious deliberation. At current, 2.5% of all water on Earth is actually freshwater. 70% of that 2.5% is in frozen glaciers and the Antarctic's. This leaves less and 1% of that accessible to mankind. When you consider how much of that freshwater is used for other activities (such as agriculture, power-production, manufacturing, sanitation, and so on) it becomes increasingly clear just how rare and valuable freshwater is. And while freshwater is not an nonrenewable resource, it would be a mistake to believe that are capacity to use freshwater for human consumption is limitless. After all, there is a limit to just how much freshwater can be extracted, used, and contained without causing a reciprocal impact elsewhere in the environment. Hence, why we have other technical measures such as desalination (which you have mentioned). However, the problem with this technique is that the process is incredibly energy-intensive. So, yest you may remedy freshwater issues, however this resulting action on are part will result in the consequence of having to find new sources of energy to allow for desalination. So, you are correct in outlining freshwater issues int he future as problem, but the technical realities are steep and perhaps insurmountable without creating another resulting problem.

Source: www.globalchange.umich.edu...

reply to post by jimmiec


See here's the problem. As soon as you BOTTLE water, you are effectively making it synthetic. Considering the amount of chemicals that are introduced from plastic bottles, especially when exposed to sunlight, you can imagine that hardly ANY water is indeed "fresh".

The idea of the future is to use sea water and desalinization plants. It is insanely expensive however, so until the cost isn't prohibitive, we are stuck rationing.

~Tenth

Taking into consideration, the fact Fresh Water only amounts to just below 3% of all the worlds water. With half of that been stored in the ice caps and another quarter of it in ground water - I'd say we're taking real low percentages here that can be taken and bottled up, around the 2/3% mark, probably lower.


My guess is as good as yours, its an interesting question

reply to post by ForwardDrift


This is why I don't post in the real subjects I like, because people like you just read my #ing mind and can write what I'm thinking in much better detail

You must also take into account the water stored in central heating systems, car radiators, all bottled drinks, foods, shampoos, lotions, swimming pools, aerisol cans... The list is endless.. As with the population this list is constantly growing too..

Thanks for the replies and the link. The thought just came to me when reading about sinkholes. I know they are likely not caused by bottling fresh water,but it made me think about our fresh water supply and look into how much is bottled up. I am not really for nuclear plants but it would seem to be in our best interest to start generating some fresh water soon. There is far less than i thought there was after reading your replies I think at least one nuclear plant dedicated to desalinisation would be a good idea. We can't go on like this forever.

I had also read about a coating applied to bottles/cans. I can't recall the specifics but it wasn't healthy anyway. Hmm, well I'm off to do some research on this coating i keep digesting!

In 10 years we will be drinking sea water
in 100 years we will be drinking the moon of Jupiter
in 500 years we will be creating water among everything else out of dark matter
in 1000 years we will not require food, water or air to "live"

The thing is that the world is very, very big in comparision to us humans - even seven billion of us. The amount of water held in our bodies is not really that much compared to lakes, rivers, the atmosphere and nature itself. In the great scheme of things, as far a water goes, the only thing we have problems with is not enough for a growing number of people.

Regards

reply to post by jimmiec


According to Wiki, the US sells roughly 30 Billion bottles of water a year.

ETA:

My maths are way off, so edited.

I am still researching this. It opened up the proverbial can of worms for me. I will go into more detail with some links and stats when i feel comfortable with my findings. It does not look good so far for us. The word "fresh" when talking about water is misleading I'm afraid. I may die of thirst before i get to post my findings. It is looking nasty, very nasty.

I got to thinking though. I have research of a sort that has been ongoing for over 80 years. The results of drinking spring water all your life vs drinking tap/bottled water. It is a living experiment using my aunts and uncles.

I had made a thread a few months ago about my grandmother and her farm. It is at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains and has a spring that has never run dry. They used it for everything, even piping it into the house. Here is a link to the story about her and the farm. It is still here and I have several aunts and uncles who still live there and use the spring water. I will post later about my conclusions.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

a reply to: jimmiec

Reviving this thread, because this is not stupid. You're definitely on to something. Some people will think it sounds insane, but really think about it. All across the entire planet water is bottled, used in millions of products and manufacturing. There is water trapped inside of landfills in plastic bottles, abandoned, in warehouses. The mega corporation drink manufacturers. From coca cola to welches. Water based paint, shampoo, conditioner, soap, gels, locations, all food products. Now, this stuff does get used and recycled, but what about the stuff that doesn't?

What really made me think about this was when I was watching abandoned explorations. Pallets of drinks just sitting. We know that's not an isolated incident. There's water trapped inside of unnatural man-made containers all over the world. It can't make it back up into the sky to rain back down to earth.

Also, what about when large quantities of fresh water are moved from their original location? For example, the Colorado river. I certainly believe they're hiding something more from us. Why doesn't the water taken from the Colorado river rain back down and refill it? Where is it? Why isn't it naturally recycling?

Anyways. Yeah. People seem to think it's funny, but I really do think the unnatural trapping of water is hugely detrimental to the natural water cycle of the ecosystem. (Not even to mention weather modification!)

a reply to: Jazzule380

They say that there is the same amount of fresh water on the planet as there always has been, but to your point, how much of it is trapped and no longer part of the water cycle?

Between population growth, pollution, and water trapped due to industry such as pumping it into oil and gas wells, we may very well be in trouble.

“At current, 2.5% of all water on Earth is actually freshwater. 70% of that 2.5% is in frozen glaciers and the Antarctic's. This leaves less and 1% of that accessible to mankind.”

^ Unfortunately this is what I would call a “buzz” statistic. You need to actually THINK about how the water cycle works. Sea water evaporates and gets desalinated before falling back to the ground. The whole “2.5%” statistic is absolute BS because of this simple fact. As long as it rains (and the rain isn’t too polluted) humans will have water. Just need something to catch it in.

“It becomes increasingly clear just how rare and valuable freshwater is.”

Maybe in places that don’t get a mediocre amount of some rain per year.

a reply to: ForwardDrift