Taking this as a good faith engineering argument. What does that mean? What do you constitute a pollutant and how much is zero?

I guess as a contrived example your breath releases 40k PPM Co2. Have you tried aiming for no pollution?

The reality is we make things which involve pollutants, which we create laws to govern the safe disposal of. Engineers optimise for these constraints the same way you do. You wouldn’t have one k8s pod per request to ‘strive to keep the response times as low as possible’.

In all of human history nobody has ever had a glass of water with literally no arsenic in it, there are trace amounts in every lake, river, and well. Even the ultra-purified water used in bleeding edge semiconductor fabrication has a lot more than 1 atom of arsenic per glass. In the far future humanity might obtain the technology to create water with literally no pollutants in it but that age has yet to arrive.

How would you do that, assuming you wanted to keep up the material standard of living that the people you care about are used to?

I assume you hold yourself to that same standard?

Your car, heating, toilet and soap and all the rest release zero pollution, right?

Um, I'm pretty sure we can all get behind corps striving for the ideal. Fines align incentives.

Are you actually suggesting that we rely on the good will of a for profit corp? When has that ever worked?

To exist is to pollute.