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ORIGINATION OF THE RECYCLING SYMBOL
Friday 29 June
Have you ever wondered where the world-wide famous recycling symbol comes from? Well we're going to tell you a little bit about it...
In April 1970, the very first Earth Day was held. One person who participated in this first Earth Day was a student at the University of Southern California named Gary Dean Anderson. Mr. Anderson designed the recycling symbol later that same year.
Anderson says there was "definitely something in the air that day, in the academic community and elsewhere, that was beginning to color everyone's image of the earth and its resources. Neither, people were beginning to realize, was infinite." This awareness of the earth's finite resources and the need to conserve and renew them for future generations continues each year as we celebrate Earth Day.
Credit for the following goes to: Dyer-Consequences.com
HOW GARY ANDERSON DESIGNED THE RECYCLING SYMBOL
Gary Anderson grew up in North Las Vegas, Nevada, in the 1950s. In keeping with the times following the Great Depression and World War II, his family practiced a general frugality that involved re-using and recycling as much as possible, long before the recycling movement as we know it today had begun. His family reused newspapers, paper and plastic bags from the grocery store, and his father either made or refinished and reupholstered much of the furniture in their home.
As a child, this future architect built everything from cottages to skyscrapers with his sets of plastic American Bricks and wooden Lincoln Logs. Every Christmas, it was his job to construct a stable out of his Lincoln Logs for the Nativity Scene under his family's Christmas tree. He also liked making all kinds of things out of paper - pinwheels, paper airplanes, paper chains, you name it. An avid reader and library user, he discovered origami in a book from his school library, and did not stop until he had made every origami design in it at least once.
He excelled at both math and English in elementary school, but liked history and geography best. According to Anderson, spelling was his worst subject in those early school years. However, he especially enjoyed penmanship, which was taught by the Palmer method, and his handwriting today still retains the Palmer style. He liked the idea that even a complicated chain of letters was really made up of just a few basic lines and curves, each of which could be made with a simple stroke.
Later in his schooling, Gary Anderson began to study foreign languages, art, graphic layout, and typography. He did well in art all through school, but he noticed that there were other students who were better at drawing realistically and spontaneously. Some of them seemed to have "a bionic connection between their eye and their hand that enabled them to reproduce exactly what they saw." He adds that when drawing by hand, "I've always had to develop my image with many tentative lines drawn one on top of the other, until I get something to look more-or-less as I want it. By the time I'm finished, it kind of looks soft and furry or hairy, even when the object isn't that way at all."
From a young age, Gary Anderson was intrigued by the idea of the Möbius strip, the single-sided construction formed by gluing together the ends of a strip of paper that have been given a twist. The Möbius loop was discovered in 1858 by August Ferdinand Möbius, a German mathematician and astronomer. Anderson also enjoyed the art of the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, who produced a series of drawings based on the Möbius strip, one of which (above left) portrays ants crawling over the folded and twisted strip of paper.
When Anderson began designing his three entries for the contest, he drew upon the concept of the Möbius strip as a combination of the finite and the infinite, "a finite object, but its one surface is infinite in a way." He also tried to incorporate the concept of ambiguity, since the symbol is "kind of round, but also kind of angular. It's flat, but it seems to enclose a space ... kind of hexagonal and kind of triangular, and kind of circular ... sort of static and sort of dynamic."
In his original design, which CCA modified slightly to make it appear more stable, the symbol rested on one of its short sides, implying a much more dynamic motion and instability than the versions we see today.
Anderson drew the symbol entirely by hand with pen and ink, without the benefit of the computer-aided design software available to designers these days. In those days, computer graphics was a very new field, largely experimental, and computer-aided drafting and design (CADD) was only in the developmental stages. And of course, no one had personal computers either, and the computer classes offered in college were all taught using mainframe computers and punch cards.
Graphic design at this point was essentially limited to arrangements of different combinations of alphanumeric characters distributed across a tractor-fed page. Anderson says that, "If we were writing a program - and you had to write a program to create a computer generated image - you had to leave a stack of punched cards off at the computer center at night, and pick up the output the following day. Every time you did this, you hoped you had finally gotten all the bugs out of your program, and that what you got back from the computer center was what you actually wanted."
The design process for the recycling symbol went quickly for Anderson, especially since he had been mulling over this type of image for some time, and had experimented with several different configurations for class projects in architecture school. He worked out his clean and simple series of designs over a period of only two to three days. Looking back, he feels that his designs were influenced not only by M. C. Escher's art and the Möbius strip, but also by the wool symbol, reminiscent of spinning fibers, and the concept of the mandala as a symbol of the universe in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions.
The one (and only) sketch of his recycling symbol that survives (shown above) is the most complicated of the three designs Anderson submitted for the contest. This working sketch of the recycling symbol design appears in a letter home from college to his mother. Note that this design is resting on one of the arrows, in contrast to the version modified by CCA. The design picked by the judges as the winner was the simplest and plainest of the three, with no words or shading on it, and his third entry was something in between. Container Corporation of America did not trademark the symbol, thus leaving it in the public domain. For this reason, many permutations of the original design have been developed over the years for a wide range of purposes.
Interestingly, it took a number of years for the recycling symbol to catch on and become widely used in the United States and elsewhere. In fact, Gary Anderson had seen it only rarely before seeing it prominently displayed on recycling bins in Amsterdam while travelling in Europe some ten years after he had won the contest.
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