Ocean Literacy · Plastic Pollution

Plastic Expelled: A New Report Traces How the Plastics Industry Got Into American Classrooms

Plastic Pollution Coalition has spent a year following industry money into U.S. K-12 schools. Its findings will be familiar to anyone who studied the tobacco playbook, and they end with a concrete ask of school boards and state education departments.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Ocean Conservation

In 1994, a communications executive at the American Plastics Council was recorded describing a new educational video about a chemical recycling plant. It fits the overall message nicely, she said. It is propaganda, but the resource management messages are important. That line, first surfaced by the Center for Climate Integrity in its 2024 investigation into the fraud of plastic recycling, is the hinge of a new report from Plastic Pollution Coalition, published in August 2026 under the title Plastic Expelled: Exposing Industry Propaganda in U.S. Schools. The argument is that what was said privately in 1994 has never really stopped, and that today it reaches children through lesson plans, travelling vans, Girl Scout patches and donated basketball courts.

A note on what this is. Plastic Pollution Coalition is an advocacy organisation, a project of Earth Island Institute, and the report is a campaign document with a petition attached. It is also, on our reading, carefully sourced: 151 endnotes, most of them primary, including the industry’s own materials. We treat its claims as the coalition’s throughout, and where the underlying source is an industry document or a named news investigation we say so.

Why schools, and why now

The report’s framing is economic. Plastics are made almost entirely from fossil fuels, and as power generation shifts away from oil and gas, the coalition argues, petrochemical companies are counting on plastics to protect future profits. It cites a Center for International Environmental Law analysis putting the combined 2024 profits of the top fifteen petrochemical companies above $570 billion. Public opinion, meanwhile, has turned: the coalition points to polling from Oceana showing broad support for limits on single-use plastic.

Schools, in this account, are where an industry goes to secure the next generation of consumers and employees. The report quotes the Society of Plastics Engineers, whose foundation describes its own mission as changing the perception of plastics one classroom at a time, and whose sponsorship page tells companies that funding a school visit lets them nurture the development of their future workforce. The coalition also cites reporting in the Washington Post that some associations openly target regions where public anxiety about plastic pollution is highest.

The structural opening, the report argues, is underfunding. American school budgets lean heavily on local property tax, curriculum decisions are made district by district and often teacher by teacher, and free materials are hard to refuse. The coalition adds a twist that is easy to miss: many of the same districts are losing tax revenue to abatement deals struck with plastics manufacturers, so a donated science kit can arrive from a company whose tax break helped empty the science budget in the first place. That last point rests on Good Jobs First’s tax break tracker and a 2024 Grist investigation, both cited in the report.

What the Plastic Industry is doing here is not that different than what the tobacco industry used to do in schools. They are exploiting an educational system that oftentimes embraces free materials and something that may have the appearance of rigor, but is really about industry peddling a message that their harmful product is good. Robert Bullard, quoted in the Washington Post, February 2024, as cited in the report

A long history, mostly on the record

The strongest section of Plastic Expelled is historical, because so much of it comes from the industry’s own archive. The coalition reproduces Lloyd Stouffer’s address to the 1963 National Plastics Conference, in which the editor of Modern Packaging told delegates that the future of plastics was in the trash can and urged them to concentrate on single use. It traces Keep America Beautiful from its founding by packaging and beverage companies in 1953 through the litterbug campaign, the 1971 Crying Indian advertisement, and Waste in Place, the 1979 curriculum the report describes as one of the earliest industry-developed school programmes. Keep America Beautiful still exists, and its partner list, which the report reproduces from the organisation’s own website, includes Coca-Cola, Dow, Marlboro and Starbucks.

The report then follows the thread into the 1990s, when, drawing on the Center for Climate Integrity’s findings, it says Dow and DuPont produced classroom videos and the American Plastics Council distributed science kits of plastic pellets. And it recounts an episode first reported by the Center for Public Integrity in 2011: between 2009 and 2011 the American Chemistry Council lobbied the California Department of Education over an environmental textbook, securing a section titled The Advantages of Shopping Bags and, according to that investigation, changes to key statistics in the teachers’ edition. The council was at the same time fighting plastic bag bans across the country.

Four claims the report says are false

The middle of the report works through the materials themselves: lesson plans from the American Association of Chemistry Teachers, Keep America Beautiful’s 2015 curriculum, Society of Plastics Engineers instructor notes and videos, and a PragerU animated lesson on Leo Baekeland. The coalition sorts what it found into four recurring messages, and pairs each with what it argues the science actually says.

Readers can judge the strength of each counter for themselves; the health and recycling arguments are well established in the peer-reviewed literature, while the jobs argument rests more on projection. What is harder to dispute is the pattern the report documents in the materials: waste framed as a consumer problem, health effects absent, and no disclosure of who paid for the lesson.

The case studies

Four are singled out. The Society of Plastics Engineers runs the PlastiVan, a mobile classroom that, by the society’s own count cited in the report, has reached more than 140,000 students since 2014 and visited 68 cities in 2025 alone. Visits can be sponsored by member companies; the report says Chevron Phillips has paid for at least twenty, with BASF, Braskem and DuPont Tedlar among the 2025 sponsors. The society merged with the Plastics Industry Association in 2026, and the report quotes its executive vice president, Pat Farrey, on a plastics podcast explaining that influencing how young people think about plastic as a career is where the industry expects the most long-term impact.

The American Association of Chemistry Teachers was launched in 2014 by the American Chemical Society with Dow, which the report notes committed to help produce more than 750 lesson plans. One paywalled lesson the coalition obtained, Paper or Plastic?, asks students to imagine themselves as Dow employees. Teachers attending the annual Dow summit have received a $1,000 stipend.

PragerU, which the report describes as initially funded by fracking billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, offers a plastics lesson in which an animated Baekeland calls fossil fuels cheap and plentiful, thank goodness. The coalition’s concern is reach: PragerU has become an approved curriculum vendor in several states.

The fourth case is the one closest to the ground. Shell’s ethane cracker in Monaca, Pennsylvania, has, according to state enforcement data cited in the report, drawn more than sixty pollution violations since construction began in 2017. Shell’s own community page, which the report quotes, describes a $225,000 grant for plastic recycling programmes at six nearby elementary schools, nearly 1,000 donated backpacks, and a new basketball court awarded to one school as a prize for learning the right way to recycle plastic. The coalition’s point is not that the court is unwelcome. It is that a company polluting a community’s air is also shaping what that community’s children learn about pollution.

What the report asks for

The recommendations are short and specific. School boards, the coalition says, can adopt policies barring sponsored materials, sponsored programmes and equipment donations from the chemical, fossil fuel and plastics industries, and can require disclosure of who funded any third-party curriculum. State education departments can require the same transparency at the standards level and insist that plastics content align with current peer-reviewed climate and health science. The report is candid that removing industry material leaves a hole, and that the honest fix is adequate public funding, including an end to the tax abatements it argues are draining districts. A petition to school boards and superintendents accompanies the report.

For those of us who work in ocean conservation, the report is a reminder that the plastic on the beach in the photograph above was, in a sense, taught. The lesson that litter is a personal failing and recycling a personal duty was written, funded and distributed on purpose, and it is still being distributed. Whatever one makes of the coalition’s tone, the sourcing is there to check, and much of it is the industry speaking for itself.

Read the full report, and find the petition and social media toolkit, at the Plastic Pollution Coalition announcement page.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean