Vote AGAINST Item 7 at Target Corporation’s June 10, 2026 Annual Meeting — You May Vote Now
National Legal and Policy Center (“NLPC”) urges shareholders of Target Corporation to vote AGAINST Item 7 on the 2026 Proxy Ballot — a shareholder proposal submitted by As You Sow requesting that Target issue a report evaluating opportunities to reduce plastic microfiber shedding from its garments. NLPC’s exempt solicitation report in opposition is available now.
Download the Full ReportWhile this marks NLPC’s first formal shareholder engagement on any issue at Target, the organization has tracked the Company’s governance, management, and financial trajectory for years — and the picture is not encouraging. A company that has struggled to compete in the retail marketplace is in no position to voluntarily layer on scientifically unjustified compliance burdens.
The health crisis narrative driving Item 7 is built on dubious, unsubstantiated science. The proposal claims microplastics have been found in human brains and linked to cancer, Parkinson’s disease, and dementia — but the studies underlying these claims are in scientific dispute.
A January 2026 investigation by The Guardian documented that numerous high-profile studies claiming to detect microplastics in human organs have been “thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives.”¹ The primary brain microplastics study was formally challenged in a published Nature Medicine Matters Arising for “limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps.”²
In March 2026, University of Michigan researchers found that the nitrile and latex gloves worn by microplastics researchers to prevent contamination are themselves a contamination source, generating approximately 2,000 false positives per square millimeter.³ The health crisis narrative is not settled science — it is an edifice of methodological uncertainty.
The environmental premise fares no better. A 2021 study published in PLOS ONE by Ocean Wise Conservation Association researchers found that cotton and wool shed comparable amounts of microfibers to synthetic fabrics during laundering.⁴ The ocean plastic problem the proposal invokes is overwhelmingly a waste management problem in the developing world.
Jambeck et al.’s foundational 2015 Science study ranked the United States approximately 20th in ocean plastic inputs.⁵ A 2025 UC Santa Barbara study spanning four continents confirmed that the rivers with the highest plastic pollution rates are uniformly in developing economies, and that local waste infrastructure — not the fiber composition of garments sold in American stores — determines how much plastic reaches the ocean.⁶
The proposal’s own citations betray its evidentiary weakness. Its primary foundation for the claim that plastic threatens oceans, wildlife, and human health is a WWF advocacy report⁷ that NLPC has identified across its 2026 proxy season filings as overstating plastic’s environmental costs while ignoring trade-offs.⁸ Its footnote linking microplastics to cancer and dementia leads not to a peer-reviewed study, but to a university communications article.
Target’s Board correctly identifies 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.”
For full-year fiscal 2025, Target’s operating income declined 8.1 percent and adjusted EPS fell to $7.57 — more than a dollar below the prior year.⁹ This is not the moment to volunteer scientifically uncertain, operationally complex compliance obligations.
Vote AGAINST Item 7. You may vote now at www.proxyvote.com (you will need a control number or your account number).
ENDNOTES
- Damian Carrington, “‘A Bombshell’: Doubt Cast on Discovery of Microplastics Throughout Human Body,” The Guardian, January 13, 2026. See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/microplastics-human-body-doubt
- F.A. Monikh et al., “Challenges in Studying Microplastics in Human Brain,” Nature Medicine 31, pp. 4034-4035, November 2025. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04045-3
- “Nitrile and Latex Gloves May Cause Overestimation of Microplastics, U-M Study Reveals,” University of Michigan News, March 26, 2026. See https://news.umich.edu/nitrile-and-latex-gloves-may-cause-overestimation-of-microplastics-u-m-study-reveals/
- Ekaterina Vassilenko et al., “Domestic Laundry and Microfiber Pollution: Exploring Fiber Shedding from Consumer Apparel Textiles,” PLOS ONE 16(7), July 9, 2021. See https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0250346
- Jenna R. Jambeck et al., “Plastic Waste Inputs from Land into the Ocean,” Science 347(6223), February 13, 2015, pp. 768-771. See https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1260352
- “How Plastic Pollution Flows from Rivers to Oceans — and How to Stop It,” UCSB The Current, July 24, 2025. See https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/021966/how-plastic-pollution-flows-rivers-oceans-and-how-stop-it
- “Shareholder Proposal Requesting a Report on Reducing Plastic Microfiber Shedding (Item 7),” Target Corporation 2026 Proxy Statement, Pages 90-92, April 13, 2026. See https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/27419/000162828026027508/tgt-20260426.htm
- Exempt Solicitation Report in Support of Shareholder Proposal at Mondelez International, Inc., circulated to investors, National Legal and Policy Center, April 2026. See https://nlpc.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/MDLZ-Mondelez-International-Inc-Nasdaq-MDLZ-PX14A6G-Notice-Exempt-Solicitation-2026.pdf
- “Target Corporation Reports Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2025 Earnings,” Target Corporation, March 3, 2026. See https://corporate.target.com/press/release/2026/03/target-corporation-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2025-earnings
(Post references PX14A6G Notice of exempt solicitation)
