A group of shareholders want Target Corporation to issue a report on reducing synthetic microfiber shedding from its clothing — and NLPC is circulating its case to Target investors ahead of the company’s June 10, 2026 annual meeting, urging a vote AGAINST Item 7.
Don’t wait for the meeting: Target shareholders can vote now at proxyvote.com. An executive summary of NLPC’s exempt solicitation report is available now, with the full report is being distributed directly to Target investors.
This marks NLPC’s first formal shareholder engagement at Target, but NLPC has tracked the company for years — through its ideologically-driven management decisions, its celebrated “woke” status, and its persistent financial underperformance. For full-year fiscal 2025, Target’s operating income fell 8.1 percent and adjusted EPS dropped to $7.57 — more than a dollar below the prior year.
A company in that shape has no business volunteering additional activist-driven compliance burdens.
Item 7 is submitted by As You Sow, a liberal shareholder activist group that has made pushing plastics proposals at major corporations a primary tactic. The proposal claims synthetic microfibers from clothing are linked to cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia, and that they are found in human brains.
These claims cite contested, unreliable science. A January 2026 Guardian investigation found that the studies underpinning the microplastics-in-human-organs narrative are “probably the result of contamination and false positives” — a conclusion one chemist called “a bombshell.” The primary brain microplastics study was formally challenged in Nature Medicine itself for inadequate contamination controls.
And in March 2026, University of Michigan researchers published findings that the gloves lab researchers wear to prevent contamination are themselves generating approximately 2,000 false positives per square millimeter. The health crisis that Item 7 is premised on is an edifice of bad methodology.
The environmental case doesn’t hold up either. The proposal implies that if Target reduces synthetic fiber content in its clothing, ocean microplastic levels will fall.
That is not what the science shows. A landmark 2021 study published in PLOS ONE by Ocean Wise Conservation Association researchers — an environmental organization — found that cotton and wool shed comparable microfiber amounts to synthetic fabrics during laundering.
More fundamentally, the Jambeck et al. 2015 Science paper established that ocean plastic pollution originates overwhelmingly from developing-world river systems with poor waste management — not from American laundry machines. A 2025 UC Santa Barbara study spanning four continents confirmed the pattern is consistent and global.
What’s the evidentiary foundation of Item 7? Footnote 1 of the proposal is a WWF advocacy report — not a peer-reviewed study. Its footnote linking microplastics to cancer and dementia links to a Duke University news release promoting Duke’s research program. This is the quality of science shareholders are being asked to act on.
Even Target’s Board opposes Item 7, correctly identifying the microfiber field as “an emerging field of scientific study, characterized by evolving research, inconsistent measurement approaches, and the absence of widely accepted regulatory or voluntary standards.” NLPC agrees with the Target board’s recommendation.
Read the executive summary and full report, then vote AGAINST Item 7 — at proxyvote.com, right now (you will need a control number or your account number).
(Post references PX14A6G Notice of exempt solicitation)
