The buyer doesn’t know which company is responsible and which company’s suppliers are responsible etc. This is why we need legislation and enforcement.

Imagine another scenario. You are my neighbour. I spill some poison on the ground. Your child gets ill. Am I at fault?

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whatever1 21 hours ago | parent [-]

The companies who care will fund 3rd party certification orgs that will check whether the standards are met. They do it already for car safety, responsible raw materials sourcing, recycled content etc.

If it is a feature the customers care about they will market it. But frankly customers just want a better price today.

	▲	cogman10 19 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This only works in competitive markets. A number of markets have few competitors which means it's beyond easy for all the companies to externalize everything. Further, some products have deep supply chains that are easy to mix. Consider copper as an example. A responsible company will want to use recycled copper as much as possible because it's cheaper. However, can anyone realistically validate that none of that copper came from stolen cables or bad mining practices?
	▲	mindslight 19 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No, you're falling for the efficiency market fallacy. Demand does not always create supply. Markets are not some type of super-classical computer, they are bound by the same stickiness as any NP-hard problem.