Distribution of Water Footprint Components of University Students and Detecting the Factors that Affect Those Components

20% of world population face the risk of disease and death due to the lack of access to healthy drinking water. A certain portion of water resources can no longer be used because of being polluted while some other parts pose danger for public health because of substructure incapacity. Water footprint is a remarkably crucial concept in terms of sustainable water management. Within the context of this study, consumption habits of university students and related changes in water footprint values have been investigated. Water Footprint Survey has been administered to participant university students and water footprint profiles of the students have been designed based on water footprint values computed according to survey results. At the end of the conducted analyses in Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa Avcilar Campus, mean annual rate of water footprint per person has been computed as 1848.78 m3 for students. Components of this water footprint has been designated as; green water footprint 1329 m3/per person/year, blue water footprint 199 m3/per person/year, grey water footprint 320.78 m3/per person/year. In addition, by transferring the data attained from surveys to IBM SPSS environment, presence and/or absence of a significant relationship between variables has been analyzed. It was then observed that parallel to the rise in students' income level a corresponding climb emerged in general water footprint.

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