How a student’s design grew to mean so much
Now that the evenings are lighter and a little warmer, take a walk around your neighbourhood the night before the collection of the recycling waste.
You’ll find at the roadside bags, boxes or wheelie bins, and will immediately notice just how full they are. Think about this a little and multiply what you see by the number of homes and businesses in Britain and the sheer amount of recycled waste becomes astronomical and now accounts for 45 per cent of all household rubbish.
One of the most common items of plastic waste is the milk bottle which today is generally made out of at least 40 per cent recycled material. Look more closely and you’ll see the triangular recycle symbol with its three little arrows forming a Mobius loop, sometimes with a number in the middle and sometimes with letters underneath.
These identify the type of plastic and how commonly and easily they can be recycled. Not everyone knows what the numbers and letters mean but the symbol itself has become one of the most commonly used and known recognised logos.
So how did it come about?
Over 50 years ago, the Container Corporation of America (CCA) sponsored a competition for high school and university students to raise awareness of environmental issues and draw attention to its recycled paperboard production.
Gary Anderson was then a Californian engineering and later architecture student and his winning design was specifically aimed at the paper industry so his arrows looked rather like sheets of paper blowing in the wind.
His original inspiration was a childhood visit to a newspaper where giant rolls of paper were fed into the presses.
The winner was announced on the first ever Earth Day, April 22, 1970, and it has been said that the shape inside the triangles resembles a stylised tree, the source of pulp for making paper.
The design has gone through many mutations but remains pretty much the same the world over. Anderson himself more or less forgot about his creation as it was not particularly widely used in the early 1970s.
On a trip to Amsterdam some years later, teaching in Saudi Arabia, he spotted an igloo shaped bin with a recycle logo and remembered that this was his design.
“I was really struck. I hadn’t thought about that symbol for years and here it was hitting me in the face,” he later recalled in an interview in 2012.
Design commentators have pointed out the influences of the graphic artist Mauritz Escher and the Bauhaus simplicity of distilling a big idea into a few lines.
Today the logo is immediately understood, so much so that as soon as you see it, you think ‘recycling’.
We like to think of designers slogging away at their creations, scattering to the wind prototype ideas but in this case, Anderson spent just a few hours on the design and much appreciated the prize money of about $2,000 which enabled him to undertake a postgraduate year in Sweden studying social sciences.
He didn’t really develop into a graphics designer but instead focused his career on urban planning and architecture, both professionally and academically.
Today the logo is a common feature on all sorts of packaging but we should remember that it has taken 50 years to become so established and whilst hardly anyone remembers its creator, we all know what it means.