The Recycling Symbol

Steve Snodgrass | Flikr (CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0))

You know it quite well. It’s the green trio of arrows that guilts you into tossing your empty Coke can into the right bin.

It all came to be in 1970 when the Container Corporation of America initiated a contest for art students to design a uniformed symbol for recycling. The winner? None other than USC student Gary Anderson.

Anderson was in USC’s School of Architecture working on a Master’s Degree in Urban Design when he won with a logo he modeled after a Mobius strip.

Since its inception, the symbol has been made a part of public domain and has seven different Unicode registrations.

In 1998, Anderson told Resource Recycling that he was gratified and proud to have made such a recognizable contribution to society.