the price of sustainability

I love this idea: "To make reusing safer, faster, and thus more cost-effective, plastic and metal components should be stamped with codes indicating their provinance and their chemical composition. And the pricing of products should reflect their environmental impact, their cost to public health, their psychological benefits, their social merits, and their geo-political implications." I wish that this will one day occur, and if designers take a stance to make it happen, it could. However, will people really care? Walmart wouldn't sell their cheap, short-lived products at a higher cost because of the space they take in a landfill, and there are too many people who can't afford it anyway. Quality costs money, and a lot of people don't think about it when they're making a purchase. A lot of less-developed countries with lower environmental standards will still be making the same low-quality products because people will still buy it. The same should happen for foods that are unhealthy- why is junk food so cheap, while health food is so expensive when obesity is a nationwide problem? Sustainability is definitely becoming more and more of a pressing issue, and getting a lot more attention these days. If laws were passed to enforce sustainability, it would be an amazing miracle, that I hope would not come too late.