In order to get that measurement, you are going to spend a lot of time with fancy calculators and such. If you live in the U.S., go to your State website. There should be a division or department of pollution, ecology or Environmental Quality. Go to their site, find the Water division, check out the Waste Water pages. or, go to EPA, Water, Wastewater, reclamation.

I hate to always sound like gloom and doom, but dern it, we are having to work harder everyday to have clean water. I don’t know what it is going to take for people to finally realize you can’t get a new Globe at Mego Mart.

Honestly, if a bunch of greedy pollutors want to catch the next rocket-ship out to the next world, I say – good riddence. Unfortunately, we will probably be the Nuclear Landfill for all their nukies up there…lol

We still have major obstacles to overcome before most of our water can be reclaimed. The water going into our sewage treatment facilities is not what most of us would feel comfortable re-using even for irrigation of food crops. It includes industrial waste water, hospital bio-hazard water, and of course people all over the city are discarding too much hazardous material, be it chemical or medical, or just biological.

We could avoid mixing in those dangerous materials if we felt the need for the water. But city folk do not see providing water for crop irrigation as their responsibility so it goes down river to the sea. Some of it will be reclaimed further downstream, filtered and delivered to other people with a bit of chlorine to make it safer.

We still use a septic system that recovers all of our waste water for crop irrigation, but, because we are aware of this we know we have to be careful of what we put into our waste water. In fact our waste water can filtre down to our aquifer, where our drinking and washing water comes from. That is a powerful incentive to care for our waste water. We have to see our waste water as still a precious resource.

The amount of water on the earth today is the same as it always has been. It does not escape the earth’s atmosphere. It may change locations from time to time, as in flooding versus drought, but it always remains constant in terms of availability to the world as a whole. Most of the water consumed by "civilized’ man is processed through elaborate reclamation stations and natural systems. Testing for water purity and/or ground-water contamination is a constant process carried out by even the smallest communities in this nation. Every effort is made to assure users that water is kept at or above strict government standards at ALL times.