With pollutants you can get a grip on in terms of how much is being emitted, and where it's being emitted, you create de facto property rights in the pollutant, you allow it to be traded off against pollution reduction technology. And with rather little effort you can develop very efficient markets that drive pollutants to a steadily declining level as the technology of pollution abatement improves and technological substitutes emerge. The problem areas come where you're dealing with things that are so diffuse that you cannot even get a handle on where stuff is coming, and where stuff is going. Consider carbon dioxide, which may or may not be called a pollutant. Nature is emitting 100 billion tons or so of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.
Humanity is responsible for five or six billion tons a year.
With such a difficult substance, it gets very hard to create market solutions, because we don't have a good handle on what the problem is. By your theory, it might be possible for groups of businesses to police themselves. That's what people have done since time immemorial. This is where you sold it, or retained it, or bought new rights. But those are exactly the same problems that arise with ordinary land.