&gt; <i>Suppose industry in your country has higher costs, because people care about say, waterways, and thus there has to be filtering and proper waste disposal.</i><p>Well then people can buy stuff cheaper from abroad, I guess? That&#x27;s certainly a benefit to them, compared to paying more.<p>There are auxiliary benefits too, because then people have more money left to spend on other things (which contributes to jobs getting created etc).<p>&gt; <i>If you allow free trade from a country where they simply dump waste everywhere, you are punishing industry for doing the right thing, and rewarding polluters.</i><p>You know no one <i>wants</i> to live in a polluted environment, right? But it&#x27;s the government everywhere that&#x27;s supposed to protect it - not people from other countries with their purchasing choices.<p>If you don&#x27;t buy stuff from China, will China be less polluted? How?<p>Suppose, for the sake of argument, 50% of all people outside of China decided to stop buying Chinese goods as a protest against &quot;bad environmental standards&quot;[1]. What would happen?<p>[1] Nevermind that the standards are circumvented with bribes anyway.<p>Now lots of stuff produced outside of China would become costlier to produce, or might not get produced at all. Living standards would decrease accordingly. Oh, and that might encourage foreign producers to do whatever it takes to lower their costs, including <i>ignoring environmental standards</i> (or bribing their way past them).<p>What about China then? Would the polluting factories etc shut down, or would they be used for producing something foreigners were still buying? Would they keep polluting after being repurposed for something else?<p>Would they pollute even more in an attempt to lower their prices to make their products more attractive to the protesting foreigners? I bet some people would start buying again if the products just were cheap enough.<p>But all in all, you see it&#x27;s not that simple. You can&#x27;t expect to force higher environmental standards on anyone by not buying from them, especially when it&#x27;s the government that decides what companies are allowed to pollute and how much, and those limits are circumvented through bribes.