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Planet Tracker: Sentiment Analysis of Corporate Reporting on Single-Use Plastics

Situation

Single-use plastics make up over 60% of marine pollution globally and half of all global plastic production. Despite growing environmental policies, marine plastic pollution is still worsening as corporate and financial decision-makers haven’t matched the scale of consumption and disposal with effective action. Planet Tracker, a UK non-profit think-tank, sought data-driven ways to influence company and investor behaviour towards reducing plastic pollution

Task

Analyze over 4,500 corporate financial reports and transcripts from plastics producers, packaging manufacturers, and FMCGs worldwide. The aim: unveil how companies discuss plastic risks, the language used, worldwide differences, key trends, and how these factors shift over time—ultimately creating dashboards that help investors and policy-makers demand real change.

Actions

  • Data Collection & Processing:

    • Secured 4,700+ corporate documents, spanning annual reports, transcripts, and filings from multiple tiers of the plastics supply chain (producers, packagers, FMCGs).

    • Developed robust Python scripts for pre-processing (stop-word removal, stemming) and word frequency analysis.

  • Context & Sentiment Analysis:

    • Counted how often key words—plastic, risk, ocean, pollution, regulation, waste, single—appear, revealing thematic priorities by company, sector, and geography.

    • Mapped how often “plastic” co-occurs near risk-oriented context words, defining text “windows” to assess the sentiment around plastics in various business contexts.

    • Applied VADER sentiment analysis to interpret positive, negative, or neutral tones in corporate language, using multiple context window sizes to ensure nuanced, meaningful reads.

  • Visualization & Dashboarding:

  • Built Tableau dashboards enabling users to:

    • Visit world maps showing frequency and sentiment trends by country, company, and supply chain stage.

    • Drill into company-specific analyses—seeing both overall counts and example passages with the strongest positive and negative sentiment about plastics.

Results

  • Actionable Insights: The analysis answered Planet Tracker’s core research questions—uncovering whether and how companies report plastic risks, how sentiment shifts over time, geographic and sectoral differences, and examples of both positive and negative language about plastics.

  • Influence on Financial & Corporate Stakeholders: The dashboards provide a powerful, visually engaging way for NGOs, investors, and the public to hold major plastics companies (and their top investors) accountable for environmental impacts.

  • Scalability & Transparency: The process, scripts, and data model are ready to ingest more data as reporting increases and can add new context words or targets as Planet Tracker’s priorities shift.

  • Operational Efficiency: Automated text processing and sentiment classification dramatically reduced the time required for insights—from months of manual reading to hours of computation, freeing up resources for campaign and policy actions.

Impact:
Planet Tracker can now clearly demonstrate which companies acknowledge plastic-related risks and which do not. The project delivered a scalable, transparent method for scrutinizing the supply chain’s environmental discourse—empowering action from financial, regulatory, and activist audiences.