It is common to hear things like it takes one gallon of water to create a single almond, or watering a lawn can take X gallons per month/year, or it takes X gallons to make one pound of beef or yield X pounds of alfalfa.
My question is, is that water “gone forever”? Or does the water thats used return to the water table/cycle in some other form. When you water the lawn does a large amount of that seep into the ground, evaporate, and return to the atmosphere?
Or is the water used in these ways truly gone forever (in terms of humans being able to use it again)?
The question is a bit like “If I spend all my money, is it truely gone forever or did it just return to the global financial streams?”
Like with the money, water exists in very different states of usefulness. Sea water, for example, is incredibly abundant, but using it requires desalination, which requires enormous amounts of energy.
Ground water is really useful, because it’s where you need it and it’s usually pretty clean.
Rain clouds mostly pull their water from the sea. Hence using water e.g. in agriculture will not increase the amount of rain by any significant amount.
Ground water replenishment thus doesn’t depend on the amount of ground water spent for e.g. lawns. Similar as your wages usually don’t depend on how much money you spend on a holliday.
So if you waste ground water, it’s mostly just gone, while you wait for rain to refill it. Sadly, in most regions that happens far slower than people are spending their precious water resources on useless nonsense like a green lawn.