I was talking about the environment, not child labour. It costs more to operate cleanly in the US because you have to install extra stuff to collect wastes, and employ more people to take care of and clean the filters/garbage collectors, and then employ yet more people to haul the trash away, and yet more people and land to dispose of the waste in a safe way.
Move that to a 3rd world country and by demanding proper pollutant/waste management and you’re actually helping to create more jobs to the 3rd world countries. China will end up wrecking the environment a long time before us, simply as they’ve got the people to have a hundred times more factories and energy plants than us.
As to child labor, I’m not sure I agree with your assumption that employing children helps them get an education. By allowing the kids to work, it means that you’re underbidding adults for the cheaper labor of children (so less money goes into the economy as a whole since the average wage is lower.) It also means that kids can work instead of going to school, so they’ve incentive not to. If it was more profitable for an adult to work, and all the best American (or other modern nation) jobs were not available for children, it would make more sense for adults to use the money they make to send their kids to school than to have them working on a farm or whatever domestic labor there was.