This is a fair and valid view of looking at things. Though the trick is to not get too heavy handed. At what point does regulation become too stifling ?

The American way is to possibly put too few responsibilities on manufacturers. The European way seems to be to saddle them with just too many regulations -- possibly killing so much innovation.

One way to approach this would be to put more responsibilities on large established companies and less on smaller companies. But then the problem is that larger companies will want to arbitrage this somehow by indirectly "owning" these smaller companies with less environmental responsibilities.

This area is far more complex than we think it is.

Also what do we do about totally new materials that are thought to be benign when introduced but then are proved to have harmful effects many years later. Does the company that introduced them now have huge open ended costs and now go bankrupt ?

The solution is as always in the middle ground. Society as a whole bears some cost of cleanup (a kind of insurance policy for all companies) and companies bear some of costs.