When did lending a hand to Mother Earth become Hieroglyphics 101? Even the Environmental Protection Agency acknowledges that recycling symbols are confusing—and worse, lead many people to believe that ...

It was 1970 when Gary Anderson, a 23-year-old architecture student at the University of Southern California, saw a poster for a design competition. The task was to design a symbol for recycling in ...

Editor’s note: This story is provided by Aspen Journalism, a nonprofit, investigative news organization. For more,visit aspenjournalism.org. As a shy and bearded young architecture student at the ...

This is an excerpt from Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic. An odd symbol, made up of three arrows arranged in a triangle, began showing up on plastic containers across America in the ...

When I visited my friend in Scotland, I was amazed to see how little waste from her family of four actually went into the garbage can. Besides their good habits of buying items with minimal packaging, ...

A new global reuse symbol is designed to help consumers quickly identify packaging that can be returned, collected, washed, and reused rather than thrown away or recycled. Sustainability experts say ...

Gary Anderson was studying architecture at the University of Southern California when he saw the poster. It was 1970, and environmentalism was in the air, along with a broader antiestablishment vibe. ...

It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment. “It’s crazy what we’re doing. It’s very, very, very bad,” she says in ABC’s prime-time ...

For most of the last decade, recycling felt like a stable habit. You sorted your bottles, flattened your cardboard, and dropped everything in the blue bin. The rules changed slowly, if at all. That ...

The recycling symbol—those three arrows stamped on myriad plastic items—doesn’t mean what most people think it does, and a California bill wants to change that. The California Legislature passed a ...

There’s a new symbol designed to identify products that can be part of larger reuse systems. It debuted on June 3 by way of PR3: The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse, a standard-setting body founded ...