Every day you wake up, eat breakfast (or lunch) and take care of business in the bathroom. But, do you know how much precious water is wasted for every leaky faucet? Well, a group of students from Energy Conservation and Environmental Protection (EGEE 102) has decided to find that out for you.

An experiment was done to find about how much water is wasted by leaky faucets. They had used a regular faucet, a measuring cup and a stopwatch to measure the total amount of water lost. When the experiment was completed, they had concluded that every one drop of water that was wasted per second equaled about 602 gallons per year.

Some people call the earth "the water planet," but the fact is 97 percent of the water on this planet is undrinkable -- and what about the remaining 3 percent? The majority of it is also out of the reach of our hands because it floats in the oceans in icebergs. In a world where fresh drinking water is scarce in some countries, an average family in the United States may use as much as 300 gallons of water per person each day. This includes drinking, cooking, bathing, washing clothes, etc.

To us, as inhabitants of the United States, 602 gallons of water is equal to only two days of our average usage of water. But to countries in Africa and other parts of the world, it is equal to three lives. So, next time you turn off your faucet, think of the people that die of dehydration and turn it off completely.