Drinking Seawater...?

It’s hard to believe that water is becoming more and more scarce but that’s simply the truth. After learning that freshwater accumulates only 2.5 percent of the total amount of water on earth you start to wonder, well what about the seawater? Seawater accumulates for the other 97.5 percent of water on the earth. Now this made me think, well how can we turn this into fresh water? Reverse osmosis is known to be the most common method of desalination. “It works by using pressure to force a solution through a membrane, retaining the solute on one side and allowing the pure solvent to pass to the other side” (Wikipedia). Well that seems to be the answer then huh? Wrong, the problems with reverse osmosis are that it does not produce nearly the amount of water as it does waste water. A lot of water needs to be used in order for the process of reverse osmosis to be successful and the outcome is minor. Household reverse osmosis units average about 10 percent of water recovery throughout the process while more industrial systems produce about 50 percent of freshwater. Once this water is wasted it is hard to recover especially for household systems. With this massive water waste there will be an increase in septic system waste which now creates another problem. Areas that use the process of reverse osmosis are those that are scarce in freshwater whether in the ground or on the surface. They use it in order to desalinate seawater or brackish water in order to obtain their freshwater. Other problems that arise with reverse osmosis is the fact that it takes much energy to process the water. With this said it costs a lot more than typical methods of obtaining freshwater. So here is some sort of solution we have so far to obtain freshwater but the question that arises is what else can we do next?
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis#Desalination