Question of the Day - 24 April 2025

The hotels are one thing, but a couple of million residents are quite another. 

So to dispose of your first supposition, standalone wastewater-treatment facilities in individual hotels would be prohibitively expensive, to say nothing of extravagant. Even then, the hotels in the resort corridor account for three percent of Las Vegas’ total water usage. Three percent! That’s mighty impressive on the low end, considering, as you say, those hundreds of thousands of toilet flushes per day, not to mention showers, dishwashing, laundry, water attractions, etc.

According to the Southern Nevada Water Authority, southern Nevada reuses nearly all of its wastewater through a community-wide water-recycling process. All water used indoors -- whether at home, the office, or a hotel -- is captured, treated to near-drinking water standards, and returned to Lake Mead. Some reclaimed water is delivered to golf courses and parks for irrigation, but most of it is returned to the lake, whence it originates.

Clark County has a large wastewater-treatment plant near the Las Vegas Wash (in a chapter of our book My Week at the Blue Angel, author Matt O'Brien described a private tour of the plant) and the ecosystem of the Wash itself acts as an additional organic "scrubber" of reclaimed water.

This is an efficient system. For every gallon of treated water returned to the Lake Mead, southern Nevada can take another gallon out of the lake without affecting its age-old allocation of 300,000 acre-feet per year. That amount was established nearly a century ago and things around here have changed since then, a bit. It's the smallest allocation of water of any state that shares the Colorado River, thus maximizing the use of the total water supply is paramount and the system reclaims 40% of all water used in the valley through this process.

As for how much water is wasted, a SNWA spokesperson said, "We could turn on every shower and sink in every hotel room on the Las Vegas Strip and it wouldn't increase the amount of water our community depletes from the lake. That's because nearly all of that water is safely returned back to the lake where it may be used again. So, our 42 million annual visitors can enjoy a long hot shower or bath without worry of wasting water.”