Thread by @FinisDunaway

As the 50th anniv. of #EarthDay approaches, let’s look now at an image you would NOT have seen on April 22, 1970: the recycling logo.

It’s a story of Escher and environmental hope, of celebrities and greenwashing, of industry manipulation and—spoiler alert--#plasticpollution.

It all started soon after the first Earth Day when Gary Anderson, a student at @USC, learned that the Container Corporation of America had launched a contest to design a recycling symbol.

Anderson was a big fan of the Dutch artist M.C. Escher, whose work had become increasingly popular among ecologists and the counterculture. Esher’s pictures—such as this one of birds changing into fish—appeared in Rolling Stone, Ramparts, and the Whole Earth Catalog in 1970.

It was this image—titled Möbius Strip II (1963)—that inspired Anderson’s design. In the Escher picture, we see ants crawling on the looped surface of the Möbius strip. It’s “a twisted ladder,” one writer explains, “that doesn’t go anywhere yet never ends.”

That idea appealed to Anderson, who used arrows “to give directionality” to his logo design. The three chasing arrows form an endless loop, providing an image of sustainability and environmental hope.

Selected as the winner by the Container Corporation of America, the logo later became ubiquitous worldwide.

Around the time of the first Earth Day, recycling had largely been a countercultural practice, but it became more mainstream by Earth Day 1990.

Consider The Earth Day Special, broadcast in primetime by ABC on April 22, 1990. The show featured Bette Midler, who played an ailing Mother Earth, along with the casts of Cheers, The Golden Girls, and more.

In this clip from the Earth Day Special, a bartender (played by Kevin Costner) reassures his anxious customer (played by Meryl Streep) that recycling will help solve the environmental crisis and also provide her with therapeutic relief.

During the late 1980s, the plastics industry began to use the recycling logo—an icon of sustainability—to shore up its unsustainable agenda. The industry altered the logo by placing numerals representing different grades of plastic in the center of the symbol.
#envhist #envhum

“Plastic packaging bearing the triangular symbol misleadingly telegraphed to the voting consumer that these containers were recyclable and perhaps had even been manufactured with processed materials,” @HeatherRogers15 argues. “But often neither was the case.”

Indeed, as @fastlerner has reported for @theintercept, plastic recycling rates never even reached 10%--but the industry continues to promote recycling as the panacea to the plastic waste crisis.

theintercept.com/2019/07/20/pla…

This is all the more troubling, as @7im recently documented in @RollingStone, as the industry gears up to INCREASE plastics production in the years ahead, thus contributing even more to the climate crisis.

rollingstone.com/culture/cultur…

@Sierra_Magazine has thoughtful pieces by @JedediahSPurdy, @Jamie_Margolin, @RevYearwood, and others about why Earth Day should be about more than recycling and green consumerism—more than seeking therapeutic redemption in those three chasing arrows.
sierraclub.org/sierra/2020-2-…