What The Man Who Invented the Recycling Symbol Thinks Today

Gary Anderson was studying architecture at the University of Southern California when he saw the poster. It was 1970, and environmentalism was in the air, along with a broader antiestablishment vibe. “It was hippies, it was love‑ins, it was be‑ins,” he recalls. “A big stew pot full of ideas and emotions.” He shared those ideals. Plus, he didn’t have much money, so the $2,500 prize on offer may have been part of why the ad caught his eye too. The Container Corporation of America—a major cardboard box maker—wanted a symbol to represent recycling, and it was sponsoring a contest to find one. Anderson had studied some graphic design, and he had an idea of what a good logo should aim for: “It needed to be very clear, very simple. And so I thought, ‘Well, I could do this,’” he tells me. “‘I already have the drafting tools.’” He sat down to brainstorm. The word recycle “brought to mind something kind of circular, in motion,” reminding him of a long‑ago school trip to a newspaper printing plant. He’d been entranced by the big rolls of paper and the long sheets of it running through the air, from one part of the press to another. He thought, too, of his fascination with the Möbius strip—a loop of paper with a twist in it that has unique mathematical properties and carries a sense of the in‑ finite. And he pictured the coffee table tome he’d recently leafed through at a bookstore, full of images by M. C. Escher, whose work often makes use of the Möbius strip, and in which “space just seems to be turned inside out.” Anderson wanted to bring all those things together. He’d been working with arrows in another project, and that was probably why he thought to include them. Over a couple of days, he went through different iterations, and in the end he submitted three versions. It was the simplest one, arresting in its elegance, that got the prize. Anderson had arranged three arrows in the shape of a triangle—each bent over itself, so a viewer seemed to see both sides of a flat strip—all chasing one another in an endless loop. With heavy black glasses and a pen poking from his shirt pocket, he posed for a photo with a Container Corp. executive. The company flew him to its headquarters, in Chicago, then to Aspen, Colorado, for a conference. Anderson shrugged when saw his design soon after on a bank statement, thinking its moment would “maybe last a season or two, and then you’ll never hear about it again.” For a while, that’s what seemed to have happened. He used the prize money to study in Sweden, and later got a job in Saudi Arabia. Sometime in the early ’80s, he wandered into an Amsterdam square during a stopover on his way to the United States. There were several big recycling bins, and his design was plastered onto each one—as big as a beach ball, he recalls, holding his hands wide. “I thought, ‘Well, it must have caught on,’” since it was being used so far from home. Read more: Recycling Can’t Solve Our Plastic Crisis The three chasing arrows only grew more visible. Whenever Anderson saw them, he’d check whether they’d been reproduced correctly; sometimes, the arrows were flattened, eliminating the multidimensional feel. But mostly, he and his creation parted ways. His résumé didn’t mention he’d designed one of the world’s most recognizable symbols until late in his career. Applying for architecture jobs, he always worried a potential employer might think, “Well, we’re not after a graphics de‑ signer.” For years, even many of his friends didn’t know. “How do you drop that into” a conversation, he wonders. “I didn’t want to seem like I was bragging.” Now in his seventies, a Baltimore retiree, Anderson thinks his younger self “would be astonished” by the logo’s journey. He knows “recycling can kind of be a crutch sometimes,” making us feel better about all the waste in our lives. But it’s still better to recycle than not, he says, and “it makes some kind of a dent in this unbridled consumerism that we seem to have developed.” He implores me not to turn his words into something negative, because that’s not what the chasing arrows are to him. All these years later, he says, “I just look at that symbol and it makes me feel good.” Read more: The Dirty Secret of Alternative Plastics Rightly so. It’s a perfect visual, conveying just what Anderson intended: the idea that materials could be repurposed again and again in an endless loop. Infinity, it hinted, could exist within the constraints of finite space—and, by extension, finite resources. That’s a seductive thought. So while Gary Anderson had conceived it for paper and cardboard, it’s not surprising, in retrospect, that the plastic industry saw something valuable in his design. Soon, companies would grab hold of the image—and the idea of recycling—and warp them beyond all recognition. Excerpted from Plastic Inc.: The Secret History and Shocking Future of Big Oil’s Biggest Bet by Beth Gardiner with permission of Avery, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Beth Gardiner, 2026.