The recycling symbol: the modest origins of a symbol which largely lost its meaning in a throwaway society

admin Saturday September 7, 2024

Grist has published a long but excellent article by Kate Yoder titled How the recycling symbol lost its meaning. But that article covers much more: a brilliant Greenpeace stunt in a garbage-filled world, the brilliantly simple symbol's surprisingly modest origins from "one-hit graphical wonder" Gary Anderson, then an architecture student, and how recycling was completely created by the private sector.

The one part of the article I am a bit skeptical about is the few paragraphs about the origins of wasting:

“It was not in our DNA to be this wasteful,” said Jackie Nuñez, the advocacy program manager at the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a communications nonprofit. “We had to be trained, we had to be marketed to, to be wasteful like this.”

(I notified Grist that their "throwaway society" link is broken.)

One thing is clear though: if recycling is a creation of the private sector, it should be no surprise to witness the same sector largely stripping the logo of its meaning. Today's waste management chaos is another direct result of our costly collective failure to protect our environment.


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