[gnicholas]

You know the saying “X doesn’t grow on trees”? Water literally falls from the sky. Sure, there are some parts of the world where it is in short supply, but where it is abundant, there is virtually no impact of overuse in a family setting.

Comparing it to food doesn’t make sense because food has to be planted, watered, fertilized, harvested, and transported. Water that falls into a local reservoir takes a negligible amount of energy by comparison.

[bigbugbag]

Drinking water does not fall from the sky, in part of the world where there are factories, motor vehicles, power plants, lightning and other cause of air pollution rain water is usually contaminated.

It may be considered safe to use to water your lawn unless it is too acid, but you should not drinking without treating it first. Especially if it has been collected and stored in a reservoir.

Then again food literally grows on trees, you just have to collect it.

Point is most of the time dishwashers do not run on rain water but on drinking water which is a scarce and vital resource so we ought to avoid wasting it.

[jamil7]

Purifying and moving that water around uses energy. Maybe it's negligible maybe it's not, depending on where you live. Regardless, the seeming abundance of a natural resource doesn't mean that you should willfully waste it. I come from a country that struggles frequently with droughts so maybe I'm biased.

[mwj]

Yeh we should be wasteful BECAUSE WE CAN!

[gnicholas]

Who said anything about being wasteful? We're talking about two different ways of cleaning plates.

[bigbugbag]

This is exactly the matter discussed here, one method being wasteful in term of drinking water and the other is not.

Which is why we should favor one over the other.

[Nasrudith]

And the point being made is that other resources are being optimized for instead - wrinse cleaning uses less effort and thus time. The resource of concern varies by area as well.

Technically a nonpotatable unpurified water tap could be used for the same purpose but in addition to the risk of "oops accidentally drank direct river water with pollution and/or hazardous natrual bacteria" the infrastructure for the fringe use would be less efficient than just purifying more water to be flushed down the drain as a cleaning process. Plus in say southern California the freshwater purification is not the limit but the input water hence the dirty looks for bottling it there instead of say the Great Lakes area where it is actually abundant. Hong Kong I believe is one of the few places that uses salt water to flush their toliets despite large seaside cities being in no way rare.

It is like mass production technically wasting more materials - at that point it usually doesn't matter compared to the sheer efficiency gains.

Granted non-sustainable uses of source water is something to be accounted for.

[Firadeoclus]

It seems to me that in this conversation the other side of the comparison is not fully explored yet.