Well, yes and no. A lot of coastal cities get their water from pressurized aqueducts, leading down from the local highlands or mountains. The reservoir which supplies an aqueduct may be a thousand or two thousand feet up, with little or no population or agriculture between it and the rain. Certain interior cities, on the other hand get their water from the Ohio or Mississippi rivers, or the Great Lakes, in which upstream cities have dumped not only sewage but industrial wastes. There is a difference. Coastal water, whatever it may once have contained, has effectively been distilled and doubly distilled. The water of certain coastal cities wins blind tasting competitions against expensive bottled mineral waters. That does not apply to the inland cities, however. These cities do not do anything remotely comparable to redistilling their water– they merely apply certain chemical treatments to it. You can taste the difference. In, say, Cincinnati water, you can taste the metallic tang of heavy industry. Cincinnati is downstream from Pittsburgh, downstream from the oil refineries at Ashland, Ky, downstream from the steel mills at Wheeling and Youngstown, and downstream from any number of abandoned and improperly reclaimed coal mines.

A toilet uses water basically as a source of power, and, given the way it is constructed, it can only use water at a “effective head” of about six inches or a foot. In a way, that is as if you insisted on running your house on three-volt electric current, all the way back to the generator. You can design a toilet which runs on vacuum from an electric-powered pump, and uses very little water. Of course, this may require a certain amount of rebuilding of the sewage plumbing as a whole. It was necessary to separate sanitary sewers from storm sewers, so that the wastewater treatment plants would not be overwhelmed by storms. If you wanted to save water beyond a certain point, it might be necessary to build additional classes of sewers and water supply lines.

The same principle applies for washing. You can combine water and compressed air in a single stream, to get much more effective washing action than that obtained by water alone. You may at some time or another have tried to fill a glass from the sink when there was an air bubble in the water line. In that case, you may remember that the glass was slammed out of your hand, and smashed into the bottom of the sink. Air is a compressible fluid, and and it can store a good deal of energy.

Of course, one has to understand the limits of application much of this material. In most populated parts of the country, we have run-off and flooding issues, not drought issues, except for crop irrigation at the peak of summer. The water discussion is framed by people living in either California or Arizona.