I worked finance at a pulp mill once - a small pulp mill by international standards. The mill used 90 million litres of water a day. It has been hard to take my own efforts to save water seriously since then.
industrial resource use is to indirectly fulfill individual demand. Recycling might be a sham but reducing individual consumption would make a difference.
(But we need a deposit on cigarette butts..)
Amusingly Ireland recently implemented a half-assed version of the same thing, but the bottles are flimsy and must be in perfect condition upon return. The machine (if it works) just gives vouchers for whatever supermarket has placed it in their car park, and the charges are stupid (tiny cans of tonic have a deposit as high as the original price).
(I didn’t work in a paper mill but have family who has and I’ve been to them plenty of times to ask questions of the engineers)
All of us can have high flow showers and toilets like we used to. The world isn’t going to end if we do. Even regions that have water shortages can solve them with technology that’s existed for the better part of a century by now. But if we do that, we will end up standing in our hot, high-flow showers thinking to ourselves—this is wrong, we don’t deserve this, this is too good to be true.
If building things was an option in California, they could just use nuclear power to desalinate water from the Pacific, but let’s be realistic.
Do you throw your junk on a street if the street is already dirty ?
It’s not because others don’t care that it’s an excuse to act like them.
Your analogy doesn't work because this has been made easy by trash cans and the effect is immediate, local, and advantageous to yourself vs water conservation which requires sacrifice and water use itself is not inherently bad, it's the results of aggregating lots of water use together that can be bad.