If you’re over 50, you might remember that you were once able to return your used glass bottles – say Lucozade, or R White’s Lemonade – to the shops, to get back a small deposit (about 2½p back in the ’70s), which was included in the purchase price. 

You might also have had your milk delivered in glass bottles. You’d leave the empties outside your front door at the end of the day for the milkman to collect in the morning (on an electrically powered milk float – was everything better in the good old days?) They’d be used again and again, or recycled when that was no longer viable (a glass bottle can be reused 20 to 30 times, and glass can be recycled countless times).

And yup, some people are still having their milk delivered this way today – but not so many. (Check out themodernmilkman.co.uk to see if you can have yours delivered – they even do soya and oat milk.)

Anyway, brilliantly we decided – well, the manufacturers and retailers did – that it was ‘better’ (i.e. much more profitable) to use plastic bottles, and when people were done with them, they could just chuck them in the recycling, or the bin / landfill.

The world of single-use plastic had arrived. And just a few years later, the planet is now a giant pile of rubbish. 

Great work us.

In England, Northern Ireland and Scotland we now get through 25 billion single-use drinks containers (bottles and cans) every year, 6.5 billion of which go into the bin rather than being recycled. That’s over 17 million each and every day. 

In October 2027, a Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) will be introduced for cans and plastic bottles, which should hopefully help begin to stem the tide of waste.

Returning bottles and cans is one way of fixing things. But perhaps a better way is to reduce the number of single-use containers we use in the first place? Having your own reusable water bottle or coffee cup is a great way to go, but what about situations where that’s less practical?

The Reuse Symbol

In March last year, the PR3 Global Standards Panel launched their Rebrand Reuse design competition, to create a standardised symbol for reusable products and packaging, and the infrastructure that helps circulate them. (PR3, which has a mission to empower and scale reuse systems, is a Resolve project – Resolve is a global NGO which works on social, health and environmental challenges.)

The idea was to create a symbol that would make reuse a more standard process, particularly at events and locations where a lot of single-use packaging could be swapped for multiple-use. That might be something like takeaway food containers and cups at festivals, theme parks or sports stadia. Places where you might not be able to bring along your own water bottle, coffee cup or packed lunch, and where longterm-use plates, glasses and cutlery aren’t practical – places where you buy your food or drink on one part of a site, but consume it on another.

Over 236 entries were submitted, from 29 countries around the world, and the winning design, the new Reuse symbol, has just been announced.

It’s been designed by Nicole Acanio and Juan Navarrete, the design leads at Epigrama, a design collective working in Bogotá and Spain. Here’s what they had to say about their design:

“This is a symbol of responsibility. [To] reuse, restore, realign, repeat, remind, recognize. To give back to the world, to restore balance, to recover meaning, to remake our purpose as human kind. We already know the destiny of a straight line on a circular planet… we know the destination is waste. So let’s put things back into place, back into function. Let’s bend the line. Let’s embrace the spiral. This is the time for resistance through care and love.” 

You can read their full case study, and you can get the symbol by filling in a form on the PR3 site, and the brand guidelines are available too.

(For an example of a UK company working with the Reuse symbol, check out Re-Universe – they’re helping businesses and organisations like Blenheim Palace and the Eden Project to transition to reusable products and packaging.)

The Reuse symbol joins a suite of recycling symbols already in use in the UK – the Möbius loop inspired Recycling Symbol, OPRL On Pack Recycling Labels, and the Green Dot.

The Recycling Symbol

The first recycling symbol to be introduced, doing good things for sustainability (more or less – this detailed Grist article delves into the bigger, more complicated picture), is the Möbius loop inspired Recycling Symbol, and it’s another competition winner.

It was designed by architecture student Gary Anderson, at the time studying at the University of Southern California, for a competition run by the Container Corporation of America (maker of cardboard boxes) in 1970, as part of the first Earth Day. (That’s Anderson and the Container Corp’s Hans Buehler in the photo above.) The jury members included Saul Bass and Herbert Bayer, and the prize was a $2,500 tuition grant (a considerable amount of money back then) with the symbol eventually being released into the public domain.

The press release at the time of the symbol’s launch (16 September 1970) described it thus:

“The arrows turn in a circular motion, symbolizing the process of recycling, the movement of an item from its inception, through its use, and its return to be reused.”

Anderson has said the design was inspired by an elementary school field trip to a newspaper’s offices “where we’d seen how paper was fed over rollers as it was printed. I drew on that image — the three arrows in my final sketch look like strips of folded-over paper”.

In the May 1999 issue of Resource Recycling magazine, Anderson outlined a bit more about his design process, which he remembers only taking a couple of days (though he had the main idea before he started drafting):

“The figure was designed as a Möbius strip to symbolize continuity within a finite entity. I used the arrows to give directionality to the symbol. I envisioned it with the small edge or the point of the triangle at the bottom. I wanted to suggest both the dynamic (things are changing) and the static (it’s a static equilibrium, a permanent kind of thing). The arrows, as broad as they are, draw back to the static side.”

In a MoMA article from April 2020, he also mentioned that he had the idea in mind before he started drafting:

“I’d already done a presentation on recycling waste water and I’d come up with a graphic that described the flow of water, from reservoirs through to consumption, so I already had arrows and arcs and angles in my mind.”

There’s also a detailed YouTube interview in which Anderson about talks more about the symbol’s inspiration and production, mentioning the Bauhaus, Buckminster Fuller and the Woolmark logo.

The symbol isn’t trademarked, so there’s no single official version, which means there’s a vast number of different examples of it out there – it’s even a Unicode character (U+2672) that’s available in a few fonts. Because of this proliferation, the quality and style of the symbol vary widely. The original design featured a single twist to the Möbius strip – so in the example above, the bottom left arrow folds under itself, the next two fold over. But a lot of digital versions feature the same arrow, folding over, repeated three times – even the version recorded at MoMA.

It seems that there was some confusion about the symbol even around the time of its launch – here’s how it was featured in the March 1971 issue of American Home magazine – rotated clockwise by 120º.

I got in touch with Gary to check which version he considers his original:

“I submitted three variations of the symbol to the Container Corporation of America. The entries became the property of the company and were not returned to me. When I went away to study in Sweden shortly after winning, I put all the paperwork and drafts associated with my entry into storage. All the material was in a locked metal filing cabinet in the garage behind the apartment I had been renting. While I was away, arsonists burned the garage down – only a few charred papers survived. Among these was a copy of the press release, promulgated by CCA in connection with announcing the new symbol. It was only slightly singed. The one draft that did survive ended up in a letter to my mother.”

Here’s the draft from that letter:

Here’s the version from the press release:

Gary told me “I consider that symbol in the press release to be the official one. It is not identical to the one I submitted. They rotated it 60° anticlockwise. But all the lines, arcs, arrow heads and spacing are to scale. The linework differs in that the lines were beefed up slightly, and the corners at the intersection of lines were made crisper. I drew the original at a size that would fit on an 8½ x 11 sheet of paper, using a rather fat Rapidograph pen. I imagine that the CCA graphics department greatly enlarged the image and retraced it making the line work actually pairs of parallel lines, the interstices of which were inked in, so that when it was reduced back to its original scale, or smaller, the linework was much more professional looking. (The technology of 1970s pre-computerized graphics!)”

As well as using the wrong arrangement of arrows, many of the digital versions out in the world aren’t drawn that precisely:

So I’ve redrawn it here, based on Anderson’s original, ever so slightly rationalised for rotational symmetry.

Download the redrawn Recycling Symbol (in .ai, .jpg, .png and .svg formats).

Essentially the symbol means ‘this thing can be recycled, somehow, somewhere’. Though of course, it really depends on what recycling is available where you are at the moment of wanting to recycle it. And there’s room for confusion, since it can also mean ‘this thing is made of recycled material’.

On-Pack Recycling Labels and the Green Dot

With most packaging in the UK, as well as (or instead of) the Recycling Symbol, you’re likely to find one of the more detailed OPRL On-Pack Recycling Labels, which let you know if something can or can’t be recycled, and sometimes specifics about which parts can be recycled, and where.

The labels work well, clearing up some of the confusion that arises from a single universal symbol.

However, it’s still the case that only 17% of our plastic waste gets recycled here in the UK, while the rest is burned in incinerators, sent to other countries, or dumped in landfill. Newer labelling is due to be introduced, though not until 2028 – the UK is waiting to see how the EU’s new recycling labelling, coming this August, goes down.

The other symbol you’re likely to see is the Green Dot logo – though it’s not always green, and isn’t really a dot.

Introduced in 1990, this isn’t strictly an eco-label, but is actually a European financing label, indicating that “a financial contribution has been paid to a nationally authorised take-back system”. It means the company that produced the item has helped finance the system, but doesn’t necessarily mean the product itself can be recycled.

So, that’s a short review of a set of symbols designed over the years to help us do a little better by sending less paper, metal, glass and plastic into landfill. If you’d like to know more about recycling generally, this Medium post The State of Recycling in the UK by Nathan Bailey (from 2024) is a good easy-to-read primer, or there’s loads of information at Wrap. And do take a look at that Grist article I mentioned earlier – it’s a good one.