Excludability is the degree to which a good, service or resource can be limited to only paying customers, or conversely, the degree to which a supplier, producer or other managing body can prevent consumption of a good. In economics, a good, service or resource is broadly assigned two fundamental characteristics; a degree of excludability and a degree of rivalry.
Air, whether it is clean or polluted, cannot exclude anyone from its use, and so it is considered a non-excludable "good". A good can be non-excludable regardless of how desirable it could be to be excluded from consuming it (such as smog or pollution in a city).
In neoclassical economics, market failure is a situation in which the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not Pareto efficient, often leading to a net loss of economic value. The first known use of the term by economists was in 1958, but the concept has been traced back to the Victorian philosopher Henry Sidgwick.
Market failures are often associated with public goods, time-inconsistent preferences, information asymmetries, non-competitive markets, principal–agent problems, or externalities.
While factories and refineries provide jobs and wages, they are also an example of a market failure, as they impose negative externalities on the surrounding region via their airborne pollutants.