It's a fair observation, but that is the US. There's a big rug in the far east with lots of toxic crap under it. There's also a lot of stuff we buried in various places and cross fingers it'll never escape.
That's fair, though. They'd rather have dirty, labor-intensive manufacturing to grow a middle class out of grinding agricultural poverty and we'd rather have desk jobs and cheap clothes.
It's a fantasy to believe there's anything more than a marginally better alternative. Certainly China is going to industrialize a lot "cleaner" and faster than we did, and when they have a real middle class they'll start caring about pollution a lot more. And it won't be "too late", I suspect.