In the human environment water certainly is: after use, or after becoming runoff, it needs to be cleaned before being disposed of. And that rock in your backyard is unlikely to be reused in the next owners’ landscaping but rather scraped away with everything else and sent to the landfill.

I think the statement is sufficiently applicable that it’s easier to list what is a proportionately small number of exceptions rather than listing the things that match.

Even when we look up we need to clean the air.