History of the Recycle Symbol

Remarkably, this international icon was created by a student for a contest sponsored by the Container Corporation of America, now part of Smurfit-Stone Container Corp.

Gary Anderson, who at the time was a senior at the University of Southern California, won the contest to design an icon that symbolized the recycling process, a development that grew out of the back-to-the-earth movement of the 1960s and was showcased at the first Earth Day in 1970.

Anderson's simple and expressive design was based on the Mobius loop, a discovery by 19th Century mathematician August Ferdinand Mobius that a paper twisted once over and joined at the tips formed a continuous single-edged, one-sided surface.