Very little water is lost in municipal water filtration. The largest loss is generally evaporation from dam reservoir which is on the order of 10%. Depening on location temperature, humidity, ect.
Don't forget you drink the same water you bathe with. At scale it's producing a lot of water.
PS: Now a lot of water is lost after filtration by leaks/breaks in water pipes. But, that's mostly an economic choice as water is really cheap replacing pipes is expensive.
The point he is making is not reduced to that, it is that you should judge things with the same metrics. I.e. how much water is used for bottled water? For running water? How much harmful chemicals can you find in soft drink, bottled water, tap water? (because running water may be very cost-efficient, but it comes with a price, the dizzying quantity of chlorine you can find inside being one).
Just giving one number out of your hat is a dishonest persuasive move (unless everybody already knows the numbers for all the previous questions), precisely because the author knows very well that most people cannot put that number into perspective. This is not a very scientific attitude for something published in a 'scientific' journal.
Despite what you might think water is not a particularly limited resource.
At the municipal level 1 cent ~= 1,000+ gallons of water but this can vary greatly by location. As a customer in many ways you are paying for pipes not water.
PS: California farmers often pay ~70$ on average per acre foot or 325,851 gallons. But, they also get a lot of water for far less than that it's the rare edge cases that are really expensive. http://westernfarmpress.com/water-70-24-million-acre-foot
I agree with you.
But what if you want to drink pure/purified water? You can do for little to no cost in certain conditions, but for city people there are either bottled water or some purifying systems that can be costly and of various levels of efficiency. Then, how much water does one liter of water costs?
But then you could argue that people don't need to drink purified water, tap water is good enough, lead levels, chlorine levels (etc) are low enough. But this is another question from the previous one, that should also be discussed taking the whole picture into account.
> But then you could argue that people don't need to drink purified water, tap water is good enough, lead levels, chlorine levels (etc) are low enough.
Distilled water will also osmotically drain you, although not at any level you should be worried about. But it's not at all clear that it's "better for you" than water with stuff in it.
To compare to this article you'd also have to calculate the amount of water used to make the pipes, dig the ditches, create the machinery to dig the ditches (and pro-rate the machinery's life time against the amount of time it's used to dig water pipe trenches), fuel used, etc, etc.
Your scale is off. The city of Philadelphia for example loses 60 million gallons per year to leaks out of 250 million gallons pumped from the river. (excluding leaks at the home and business level estimated at 1trillion gallons per year in the US.)
To get anywhere close to similar levels from the article you replacing there entire system every 20 years would need to take 20 * 60m * 340 = 408 Trillion gallons of water.
Don't forget you drink the same water you bathe with. At scale it's producing a lot of water.
PS: Now a lot of water is lost after filtration by leaks/breaks in water pipes. But, that's mostly an economic choice as water is really cheap replacing pipes is expensive.