When you go shopping and see two items for sale that seem nearly identical, do you buy the cheaper one?
If you have long term savings do you want it to earn interest?
The desire to optimize for profit exists at all levels among all participants in the economy. Everyone does it. We are the system and the system is us.
Regulations are usually the only way to fix these things because there are game theoretic effects in play. If your company spends more to clean up and others don’t, you lose… because people buy cheaper products and invest in firms with higher profit margins. The only way out we’ve found is to simultaneously compel everyone. But that doesn’t remove the incentive.
Yeah I'm aware. Learning about how American capitalism functions is what set me on the path of being an anticapitalist. Reforms and regulations will never be effective here in solving this issue. The system itself is poisonous.
what is the solution
Destruction of the system and building a new fairer one. Similar to how feudalism gave way to capitalism, things can improve. What details are you wanting to know exactly?
What would that look like?
An egalitarian society where the means of production are owned (or mostly owned) by the working class. A blend of that and small private industry with heavy regulation would be nice. I like how the Kurds in Rojava are trying to build things but it's impossible to know how successful their ideas could be while they're dodging bullets from Syria and Turkey. The Zapatista movement is another way of doing things I'd consider.
Why don't you go to kurdistan or chiapas?
Because my family lives here and I want life to improve here.
That's reasonable. Maybe you could go and learn and come back?