The Recycling Symbol Was a Student's Earth Day Entry

In 1970, the Container Corporation of America — a Chicago-based paperboard maker — sponsored a graphic-design contest to promote paper recycling and to mark the first Earth Day, held that April 22. Entry was open only to high-school and college students. The brief: design a symbol that would work in black and white, reproduce legibly at a quarter inch, and be free to use forever.

A 23-year-old graduate student in urban planning at the University of Southern California, Gary Anderson, was one of about 500 entrants. He sat down with a pencil, thought about the mechanics of a printing press he had watched and Escher's optical-illusion drawings, and produced three fat triangular arrows folded into a Möbius strip — three arrows chasing each other around a triangle, bent so the loop had a single twist. He posted the entry off and went back to school.

The judges, who included Saul Bass, Herbert Bayer, James Miho, Herbert Pinzke, and Eliot Noyes, picked it. The award was announced at the International Design Conference at Aspen later that year. Anderson got a $2,500 scholarship and a fellowship to attend the conference. Container Corporation released the symbol into the public domain immediately.

It is now one of the most reproduced graphic devices on Earth, printed on packaging in nearly every country with a recycling stream. Anderson, who did not become a graphic designer — he went into urban planning and worked for years on city development around the world — left the symbol off his résumé for decades. He has said in interviews that he assumed it had been forgotten.