In the spring of 1970, a 23-year-old architecture student at the University of Southern California spent an afternoon sketching a shape borrowed from a geometry lesson — and ended up designing the single most reproduced symbol on the planet. He never got royalties. He never got his name printed next to it. He got a one-time $2,500 scholarship check and, five decades later, finds himself explaining to reporters that no, his three arrows are not a secret satanic sign.
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The symbol is the recycling logo. The student was Gary Anderson. His sketch beat out more than 500 other entries in a contest sponsored by a paper company that no longer exists, launched to mark a holiday that was brand new that year: the first Earth Day. Here’s the paperwork behind the arrows you’ve seen a million times.
Quick answer
The recycling symbol — three arrows chasing each other around a Möbius loop — was designed in 1970 by Gary Anderson, then a 23-year-old USC student, who won a $2,500 prize in a design contest sponsored by Container Corporation of America. The company then deliberately placed the symbol in the public domain so it could spread without a licensing fee.
A paper company’s Earth Day marketing idea
Container Corporation of America (CCA), then one of the country’s largest paper and packaging manufacturers, decided to mark the first Earth Day — April 22, 1970 — by sponsoring a nationwide design competition. CCA wanted a symbol for paper it manufactured from recycled material, so it opened the contest to art and design students at American high schools and colleges, dangling a $2,500 scholarship for the winner. More than 500 students entered.
Among them was Gary Anderson, a 23-year-old studying architecture, not graphic design, at USC. He’d been turning over the Möbius strip — the one-sided loop made famous in M.C. Escher’s prints — as a visual shorthand for an endless cycle. He sketched three bent arrows chasing each other around that loop and submitted it within a day or two.
The judges flipped it on its head — literally
The version that ended up on every bottle and box isn’t quite what Anderson submitted. His original drawing balanced the three arrows as an inverted triangle, point down. When CCA adopted the design, they rotated it 60 degrees so it would stand solidly on its base — the orientation everyone now recognizes. Anderson later said he designed the whole thing almost offhandedly, surprised anyone made a fuss over it.
CCA could have locked the logo down tight. Instead, the company briefly filed for a trademark, then walked away from the claim and deliberately released the design into the public domain — so any manufacturer, anywhere, could stamp it on packaging without paying a license. That decision, arguably more than the shape itself, is why you’ve seen this exact symbol everywhere without ever once seeing a trademark sign next to it.
The part most people miss
Here’s the twist nobody mentions at the recycling bin: the symbol was never meant to certify that a product actually gets recycled. Starting in the 1980s and 90s, plastics manufacturers began printing Anderson’s chasing arrows around a number from 1 to 7 — the resin identification code — on nearly everything, including plastics numbered 3 through 7 that most municipal facilities can’t economically process. Shoppers saw the familiar arrows and assumed ‘this gets recycled,’ even when it mostly doesn’t. In 2023, the EPA formally asked the FTC to consider retiring the chasing-arrows mark on non-recyclable plastics in favor of a plain solid triangle, specifically to end that confusion. Anderson, by then 75 and a retired architecture consultant in Baltimore, told the Boston Globe he understood the complaint — ‘I do see their point’ — while admitting a quiet ‘pride of authorship’ in a symbol that, in his words, ‘took on a life of its own.’ He still fields myths he never intended, including people insisting the three arrows secretly spell out ‘reduce, reuse, recycle,’ or something more sinister. They don’t. They’re just arrows, chasing each other around a shape a 23-year-old liked from a math class.
Sources
Wikipedia’s entry on the recycling symbol, which documents the Container Corporation of America contest, the trademark filing and abandonment, and the symbol’s public-domain status.
The Long and Short (Fujitsu’s innovation magazine), ‘Innovation heroes #2: Gary Anderson,’ which carries Anderson’s own quotes about designing the symbol in an afternoon and his later career as an architect.
The Boston Globe, ‘His recycling symbol is everywhere. The EPA says it shouldn’t be’ (2023), which covers the EPA/FTC push to retire the chasing-arrows mark on plastics and Anderson’s reaction as a 75-year-old retired architecture consultant.
Explore more: more true stories from Words & Phrases.
the recycling symbol FAQs
Who designed the recycling symbol?
Gary Anderson, a 23-year-old USC architecture student, designed it in 1970 for a contest sponsored by Container Corporation of America.
Did Gary Anderson get paid for the recycling symbol?
He won a one-time $2,500 scholarship prize. The symbol was placed in the public domain, so he never earned royalties despite its worldwide use.
Does the recycling symbol mean something is recyclable?
Not always. When paired with plastic resin codes 3 through 7, it often marks material that most facilities can’t actually recycle, which is why the EPA pushed in 2023 to retire the symbol on plastic packaging.
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