Water used for evaporative cooling is, at least locally, consumed in the process as it ends up in the air as water vapor; evaporative cooling is the most common way that water is used for cooling. Eventually of course that water will return to the surface as rain. But that can easily happen thousands of kilometers away, effectively removing it from the local environment.
This is quite different from other industrial uses of water, eg cleaning, where the vast majority of the water ends up in a treatment plant and is discharged again back to local rivers. Though even then, if you're sourcing the water from underground wells, depending on the geology you may be using up a limited resource.
Fair points. Didn't really think of the possible geographic disparity in the closed water cycle...
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