ONE WILD WORLD — NEWSLETTER

Issue #040   ·   Things Companies   ·   July 2026

Go and look in your kitchen bin. Pick out something plastic and turn it over.

There it is: a small triangle of arrows chasing each other in a loop, with a number in the middle. You know what it means. Everyone knows what it means. It means this thing gets recycled — that you rinse it, bin it, and it comes back as a park bench or a fleece or another pot.

It means nothing of the sort.

That symbol is a resin identification code. All it tells you is which type of plastic the object is made from — number 1 is the stuff fizzy-drink bottles are made of, number 6 is polystyrene, and so on. It is a note from one factory to another. It says nothing whatsoever about whether the item can be recycled, will be recycled, or has ever been recycled anywhere on earth.

And that confusion isn’t an accident. It’s the product.

The chasing arrows were designed in 1970 by an architecture student called Gary Anderson, who entered a competition and won. His design was placed in the public domain — a gift, free for anyone to use, meant to encourage people to recycle paper. It became one of the most recognisable symbols on the planet.

In 1988, the plastics industry’s trade body took that symbol, dropped a number into the middle of it, and started stamping it onto plastic. Not onto the plastic that could be recycled. Onto all of it.

The industry’s defence, then and now, is technically watertight: the codes were never meant to indicate recyclability. They were only ever meant to help sort resins. Which is true — and which rather raises the question of why they were wrapped in the universal symbol for recycling, on consumer packaging, at the exact moment the public was starting to panic about plastic waste. The industry then lobbied state legislatures to make the codes mandatory. They are now required in dozens of US states.

A recycler in Oregon described the moment he understood what had happened. He was standing at the sorting line watching the bales come in, and suddenly every container had a triangle on it. Consumers looked at a soda bottle, looked at a yoghurt tub, saw the same symbol on both, and reasonably concluded that both belonged in the bin. His facility filled up with plastic he could not sell to anyone.

This is the part that turns an irritating design decision into something else entirely.

In April 1973 — fifteen years before the symbol appeared on a single pot — scientists wrote a report for the top executives of the plastics industry. Recycling plastic, it told them, was unlikely to ever happen on a broad scale. There is no recovery from obsolete products, it said. Plastic degrades every time you reprocess it. The following year, an industry insider put it in writing in a speech: there was serious doubt that recycling plastic could ever be made viable on an economic basis.

They knew the fundamental problem, and it has never gone away: making new plastic from oil is cheaper, faster and produces a better product than recycling old plastic. Every economic force in the system points away from recycling. It did in 1973. It still does today.

So by the late 1980s, with plastic waste piling up and the public turning hostile, the industry faced a choice. It could make less plastic. Or it could make people believe the plastic was being taken care of.

In 1989 the head of the trade body gathered executives from Exxon, Dow, DuPont and Procter & Gamble. The strategy they landed on was, in essence, to advertise their way out of it. The industry poured tens of millions of dollars a year into campaigns telling Americans that plastic was being recycled. It funded high-profile recycling projects, which were quietly wound down within a few years once they proved economically hopeless.

The former president of the industry’s trade association later explained the logic to NPR with a candour that is almost admirable. If the public thinks that recycling is working, he said, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment.

And at a 1994 meeting, a vice-president at Exxon Chemical summarised the industry’s position on recycling in nine words that deserve to be carved into something: we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results.

Roughly 5% of plastic waste in the United States is actually recycled. The rate has never exceeded 9%. Globally the figure is around 9%. Everything else is buried, burned, or ends up somewhere it shouldn’t — in a river, in a fish, in you.

Meanwhile, the symbol keeps working exactly as intended. In one survey, 92% of Americans said they didn’t understand the resin codes, and 68% believed that an item carrying one could simply go in the kerbside bin. It can’t. Recyclers have a word for what happens next — wishcycling — where hopeful, well-meaning people fill the bins with material that has to be pulled out and landfilled anyway, at cost.

Even the industry has quietly conceded the point. In 2013 the technical standard was revised to replace the chasing arrows with a plain solid triangle, precisely because the arrows were misleading people. Manufacturers largely didn’t bother updating their moulds. The arrows are still there. In 2023 the US Environmental Protection Agency recommended getting rid of the chasing arrows on plastics altogether, on the grounds that they deceive consumers.

The playbook, incidentally, is older than the symbol. In 1953, after Vermont banned disposable bottles, packaging and drinks companies founded a group called Keep America Beautiful — the outfit behind the famous weeping-Native-American anti-litter advert, whose message was that people start pollution and people can stop it. Not companies. People. The industry has spent seventy years teaching us that the mess is our personal failing.

In September 2024, the Attorney General of California sued ExxonMobil — the world’s largest producer of the polymers used in single-use plastic — for what he called a decades-long campaign of deception.

The allegation is precisely the one this newsletter has just laid out: that the company promoted recycling as the answer to plastic waste while knowing that the vast majority of plastic could not be recycled, technically or economically. Exxon knew, the Attorney General said, that 95% of the plastic in the blue bin was going to be incinerated, sent to landfill, or leak into the environment. His summary was four words long: they knew and they lied.

The suit also goes after the industry’s current pitch — “advanced” or chemical recycling, the promise that clever new technology will melt plastic back into its building blocks. The complaint alleges that 92% of the plastic waste run through ExxonMobil’s advanced recycling doesn’t come back as recycled plastic at all. It comes back as fuel, which is then burned.

ExxonMobil rejects the claims, points out that California has known its own recycling system was failing for decades, and says the state should have worked with the company rather than sued it. The case is ongoing.

But the shape of the thing is now impossible to miss. A symbol invented as a public gift was taken, hollowed out, and stamped onto the exact material it did not apply to — by people holding a fifteen-year-old report telling them it would never work.

The arrows never promised you anything. That was the point.

They weren’t selling you recycling. They were selling you permission to keep buying plastic.

NPR / PBS Frontline — Laura Sullivan, “How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled” (11 September 2020), and the Frontline documentary “Plastic Wars.” Source of the April 1973 industry report, the 1974 speech, and Larry Thomas’s remark that a public which thinks recycling is working will not be as concerned about the environment.

Center for Climate Integrity — “The Fraud of Plastic Recycling” (February 2024). Source of the 1994 Exxon Chemical vice-president remark that the industry was committed to the activities but not to the results.

California Department of Justice — Attorney General Bonta press release and complaint, People v. ExxonMobil, San Francisco County Superior Court (23 September 2024).

NBC News; NPR; Route Fifty; ProPublica — coverage of the California lawsuit: the “95% of the plastic in the blue bin” claim; “they knew and they lied”; the allegation that 92% of plastic run through “advanced recycling” becomes fuel rather than new plastic; US recycling rate ~5%, never above 9%.

ASTM International standard D7611, and the Plastics Industry Association (formerly the Society of the Plastics Industry): the Resin Identification Code was introduced in 1988; the codes are not recycling codes and their presence does not imply recyclability; the 2013 revision replaced the chasing arrows with a solid triangle.

US EPA (2023) — recommendation to the FTC that the chasing-arrows symbol be dropped from plastics, as resin codes coupled with chasing arrows do not accurately represent recyclability.

CBS News (2021) — the industry’s position that resin codes were developed under legislative pressure and never meant to indicate recyclability.

Recycle by City; Just Zero — the 1970 origin of the chasing-arrows symbol (Gary Anderson, competition winner, placed in the public domain); survey finding 92% of Americans do not understand resin codes and 68% believe an item bearing one is kerbside-recyclable; state mandates requiring the codes.

Keep America Beautiful history (founded 1953 by packaging and beverage interests; the 1971 “People start pollution” campaign).

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