Very interesting article ... namely because fresh drinking water is now becoming a valuable resource. I'm sure the time the article has been written, better and more efficient ways would turn up for churning out fresh water for public consumption.
1. http://guides.slsa.sa.gov.au/water
Someone else has usually put it better, this time I'll draw on user adrusi:
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8995524
The problem with freshwater is not that the global supply is limited, rather that supplies in some high-population areas are.
The Amazon river sends 209,000 cubic meters into the Atlantic every second[1]. That's 18,100,000,000 per day. A single human drinks about two liters (0.02 cubic meters) every day. There are 7 billion humans, so the global requirement is 140,000,000 cubic meters of water. The Amazon alone contains 130 times more than the global requirement for drinking water.
This is domestic consumption, which comprises 10% of water usage[2]. That means that 13 times more water flows through the Amazon than all of humanity uses. That's just one river. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River
[2]: http://www.lenntech.com/water-food-agriculture.htm
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Personally I live in Norway where we wash our garbage and shower in high quality drinking water. I still find it absurd from time to time, considering the lack of fresh water in many places in the world.
Edit: Corrected quote
One such town has an area of 25km^2, that's 25,000,000 square meters. Which means that on an average year, 75,000,000 cubic meters of fresh drinkable water fall from the sky.
Comparing that to stats in the grandparent post: 14 times as much drinking water falls on a tiny town in a tiny European country, as the whole world needs for drinking.
That's crazy.
75,000,000 cubic meters of fresh drinkable water fall from the sky per year divided by ( 0.002 cubic meters of drinking water needed per person per day x 365 days in a year ) = 103,000,000 people quenched per year.
Your tiny town gets enough fresh water from the sky for 103 million people -- still impressive.
Some back of the envelope engineering estimates imply 30 kilogallons per second, if somehow shoved thru plumbing, equates to around or over two billion low flow toilet flushes per day.
There's a lot of thirst on the west side of the Mississippi, not so much on the east.
Of course water treatment to drink that river water isn't free, nor sewage treatment to keep it drinkable downstream, but still, that's a lot of water for a river.
There are obvious analogies to income inequality. Humanity has more water than it knows what to do with, but simultaneously there are thirsty individuals.
Huh? "This story appears in the September 2015 issue of Popular Mechanics."