Plastic industry's battle to win over hearts and minds

Documents leaked from an industry group show how plastics companies are pushing back against a 'tide of anti-plastic sentiment'

- HIROKO TABUCHI

AID INFLUENCERS ON TikTok. An infomercial hosted by Dennis Quaid. Pushback against the Olympics' single-use plastic ban.

A trove of documents leaked from an influential industry group shows how some of the world's largest petrochemical and plastics companies have been waging a campaign to push back against a "tide of anti-plastic sentiment" - especially among young people concerned about the environment.

The industry group, the National Association for PET Container Resources, or NAPCOR, worked to deliberately obscure its connection to the campaign and make its content "authentic and from the creators' viewpoints," the documents show. PET stands for polyethylene terephthalate, the plastic used to make single-use soda bottles and clamshell containers.

The corporate strategizing laid out in the documents provides a behind-the-scenes look at a battle being waged over the future of plastic. The campaign's messaging was at times misleading. One paid TikTok influencer who posts about her family's life on the road in an RV claimed that "PET bottles are a closed-loop, zero-waste system."

The more than 400 pages of internal memos, presentations and other industry communications were obtained by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that focuses on the oil and gas industry, and reviewed by The New York Times.