Target 14.1: Reduce marine pollution, including nutrients and plastics
By 2025, prevent and significantly reduce marine pollution of all kinds, in particular from land-based activities, including marine debris and nutrient pollution
Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Why shareholder democracy is pivotal
Marine plastic and nutrient pollution is produced by identifiable listed companies. Consumer brands and retailers such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Amazon, Kroger, and Yum Brands drive single-use packaging. Petrochemical producers supply the resin, and meat and fertilizer companies drive nutrient runoff. Corporate lobbying is the blocking obstacle to a strong Global Plastics Treaty. InfluenceMap attributes 56 percent of negative advocacy to chemical and petrochemical sectors, with AFPM and ACC opposing production limits. Consumer goods and retail companies supplied about 67 percent of positive advocacy, according to the same InfluenceMap analysis. CIEL counted at least 234 fossil fuel and chemical lobbyists registered for INC-5.2 in August 2025. Shareholder voting is already the tool in use. As You Sow packaging resolutions received roughly 49 percent support at Amazon in 2022 and won a reusable-packaging study commitment from McDonald's in 2023. Corporate conduct is close to decisive: packaging volumes, resin production and agricultural runoff. Petrochemical lobbying is the documented block on the treaty. Municipal waste management still matters, but owners can deliver most of this outcome.
How this was scoredPivotal
Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- Corporate Advocacy on the UN Global Plastics Treaty, 2025 Update, InfluenceMap, 2025-12
- Fossil Fuel and Petrochemical Lobbyists Overrun Plastics Treaty Negotiations, Center for International Environmental Law, 2025-08-07
- Amazon, Yum Brands, Kroger face upcoming shareholder votes on circular packaging, Waste Dive, 2023-05-10
1 campaign on record
Issue a report by December 2021 estimating how much plastic packaging Kroger releases into the environment and describing the company's strategy to reduce plastic packaging.
Result: 45.6% of votes cast were in favor The proposal was precatory (advisory and non-binding).
Kroger later pledged that its Our Brands packaging would be 100% reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2030 and launched a mail-back recycling program with TerraCycle's Loop, but As You Sow found the company set no recycled-content goal for plastics and had cut its earlier 20% recycled-content pledge in half.
Kroger: Sustainable Packaging Policies for Plastics, As You Sow
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.