Do we waste water without realising it?

I have been careful about using water since childhood -- coming from a small town where community water was available from 6 am to 8:30 in the morning and the same time in the evening -- and I am talking about the seventies. Old habits die hard and I still dislike the sound of water overflowing as people go on with their daily tasks.
I recently came across this article -- http://www.copperwiki.org/index.php/Virtual_Water . It says " Every T-shirt we all love to wear requires 25 bathtubs of water to produce. When this T-shirt is exported it also amounts to exporting 25 bathtubs of “virtual water” to that country. If the importer is a water-strapped country it saves in the process 25 bathtubs of virtual water it would otherwise have used in making the T-shirt indigenously."
Is there a way I could find out how much water a product has consumed "from the workshop to the retail shelf". I could then choose the less "water expensive product".