Question

How much water is wasted from dripping taps every year?

Answer 1

Try to calculate the amount of water that can drip from just one tap if it kept dripping assuming a tap drips each second or something closer to it and each drop of water contains one fourth milliliter of water.

Complete step by step answer:
The earth contains two third of water and one third of it is land. The water that is available to us contains 97% ocean water and only 2% water is usable for us for drinking and agricultural purposes. On our surface of earth so many third world countries and even modern countries face the problem of water crisis each year. Though we have 2% of water available to us we are not still aware about wasting water.

If one of our taps at home drips throughout the year the wastage of water is enormous. Let’s assume we have a water tap that drips each second one drop of water. Now, one drop of water contains $0.25\,ml$ of water on average. So, if it drops for one hour the wastage of water in one hour will be $0.25 \times 3600\,ml$ or $900\,ml$ of water which is the consumption of many families in the African countries which suffer from water crisis.

In a normal household that is one third of the consumption of an adult person. Now, if the tap drip straight for seven days the wastage will be,
$0.25 \times 3600 \times 24 \times 7\,ml$
$\Rightarrow 151200\,ml = 151.2\,l$
If it drip for one month the wastage will be,
$151.2\,l \times 4 = 604.8\,l$
And if it drips for a whole year the wastage of water will be,
$\therefore 604.8\,l \times 12 = 7257.6\,l$

So, just from one tap dripping each year the wastage is $7257.6\,l$ which is enough for a whole family of five members for $20\,days$worth of consumption including bathing, washing and all.

Note: The calculation here is only hypothetical. We have only considered here just one tap. We in our household have many taps that we use. If we take into account those and with higher dripping rates the numbers will be and in reality is higher than this.