On weak compactness in projective tensor products

We study the property of being strongly weakly compactly generated (and some relatives) in projective tensor products of Banach spaces. Our main result is as follows. Let 1 < p,q < infinity be such that 1/p + 1/q >= 1. Let X (resp., Y) be a Banach space with a countable unconditional finite-dimensional Schauder decomposition having a disjoint lower p-estimate (resp., q-estimate). If X and Y are strongly weakly compactly generated, then so is their projective tensor product X circle times circumflex expressionccent pi Y.