That is an excerpt from Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic.
An odd image, made up of three arrows organized in a triangle, started exhibiting up on plastic containers throughout America within the fall of 1988. Inside it was a quantity.
The thought to place codes on plastic containers got here from the Society of the Plastics Trade. By 1987, Lewis Freeman, the commerce physique’s head of presidency affairs, had begun listening to that the fledgling plastics recycling trade was struggling to make sense of the handfuls of several types of plastics they had been receiving. The plastics had completely different melting factors and different properties, which meant they couldn’t simply be combined collectively for recycling.
“Plastics will not be actually one materials; it’s umpteen supplies,” explains Freeman. “Whereas plastics share an identical molecular construction and most are constructed from oil or pure fuel, they’re in any other case fairly completely different from each other.”
Earlier than he joined SPI in 1979, Freeman labored as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, preventing Senator Ted Kennedy’s push to interrupt up large oil firms. At SPI, the place he stayed for greater than 20 years, Freeman handled something that might pose a reputational threat to the plastics trade. He spent a lot of his time convincing firms to make adjustments that will forestall the danger of regulation.
When it emerged that dozens of infants annually had been dying by drowning in massive plastic buckets—at 5 gallons, the buckets had been so heavy that if an toddler fell into them, they didn’t tip over—Freeman was the person who rallied the trade at hand out warning stickers to folks shopping for the buckets. The businesses, he remembers, didn’t need to add everlasting labels, which made the buckets a number of cents dearer. Ultimately, they capitulated when it turned obvious their authorized legal responsibility was huge.
“Corporations are basically all the identical no matter trade,” says Freeman. “They don’t wish to be instructed by another person that they should do one thing, interval.”
An emblem to help recyclers—not shoppers
Again in 1987, Freeman took the complaints he was listening to about recycling to SPI’s public affairs committee. Because the trade noticed recycling as a device to mitigate reputational harm, the general public affairs group, consisting of males from large packaging makers like Owens-Illinois and the American Can Firm, was the pure place to debate it.
The dizzying array of plastics in the marketplace was hardly the one problem plaguing recycling. Plastic’s recognition got here right down to it being mild, low-cost, versatile, and strong. However being mild and low-cost harm on the opposite finish. Haulers, who had been paid by the ton to gather recycling, made far more cash filling their vehicles with heavier aluminum or cardboard than with light-weight plastic.
Issues had been worse for some plastics than others. Polystyrene foam was economically unviable as a result of it was principally air. Plastic baggage, wraps, and movies additionally needed to be collected individually, or they gummed up sorting equipment. Packaging makers most well-liked virgin over recycled plastic because it was higher high quality and often cheaper. If there have been no consumers, it didn’t matter how technically recyclable one thing was—it wasn’t going to be recycled. Again within the late Nineteen Eighties, solely containers constructed from PET—the plastic utilized in single-use drink bottles—and HDPE—generally used to make milk jugs and detergent containers—had been being recycled in any vital quantity. (The state of affairs stays the identical at this time.)
These plastics weren’t changed into new soda bottles or milk jugs, however as a substitute downcycled into lower-grade development materials that was only one step faraway from the landfill. All the opposite sorts of plastics went straight to landfills or incinerators, in the event that they weren’t littered.
Slapping a code on the underside of plastic containers wouldn’t repair most of those issues. However at the very least it could assist recyclers know what they had been coping with, Freeman instructed SPI’s public affairs committee.
Many plastic resin producers within the room had been in opposition to the thought. They feared that together with a code would encourage client items makers to spurn plastics that weren’t being recycled.
Even the makers of recyclable PET and HDPE containers didn’t embrace Freeman’s proposal. Freeman compares them to the bucket makers who most well-liked to take a seat on their arms till they’d a legislative gun pointing at their heads. “The bottle producers opposed it as a result of it required them to do one thing,” he says.
Freeman finally prevailed. He insisted the code was a strategy to forestall necessary regulation that may very well be far dearer and onerous. For plastics that weren’t at present being recycled, the code was step one in direction of enabling this, he added, because it meant they may very well be extra simply sorted.
And so the “resin identification code,” because the trade known as it, was created in 1988. Whereas there have been dozens of various sorts and subtypes of plastics, SPI—trying to hold prices and complexity low—grouped them into seven broad classes, which nonetheless stand at this time.
They’re:
- Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used for soda and water bottles
- Excessive-density polyethylene (HDPE), used for milk jugs, detergent containers, and purchasing baggage
- Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), used for bank cards and capsule packs
- Low-density polyethylene (LDPE), used for disposable gloves, trash baggage, and dry-cleaning baggage
- Polypropylene (PP), used for yogurt tubs, takeaway packing containers, and butter containers
- Polystyrene (PS): the strong type is used to make disposable cutlery and cups, whereas the expanded type (EPS) is used for foam egg cartons, meat trays, and fast-food containers
- Different plastics: a catch-all for remaining plastics together with multilayer packages like pet meals pouches and ketchup sachets that incorporate several types of plastic, in addition to bioplastics
“It was a advertising device”
To separate the quantity from different descriptors used on containers, SPI enclosed it within the chasing arrows image.
It was an odd alternative, one that will forged doubts over the plastics trade’s motives for many years to come back.
Again in 1970, Gary Anderson, a 23-year-old structure pupil on the College of Southern California, had seen an infinite wall-sized poster promoting a design competitors. Sponsored by Container Corp., a paper packaging maker that was additionally the biggest paper recycler within the U.S., the competitors required individuals to design a logo “for the love of earth” to “symbolize the recycling course of.”
Anderson’s design—that includes three arrows twisting and returning into themselves—received. He acquired a $2,500 tuition grant and a visit to Chicago in September 1970 to attend a press convention at Container Corp.’s headquarters.
“I used to be sort of an smug little punk pupil, and I assumed the entire thing was sort of foolish, truly,” recollects Anderson, who again then sported a goatee and wore his purple hair—bleached blond by the California solar—in curtains parted barely to the aspect.
By means of the Sixties, the paper trade—very like plastics would later—had confronted mounting criticism about how its disposable merchandise had been flowing to landfills. Container Corp. made the brand new chasing arrows image out there to your complete paper trade to be used on delivery containers and folding cartons, saying it hoped the image would unfold consciousness in regards to the significance of paper recycling.
“It was a marketing device,” explains Anderson.
Regardless of this, in 1988, when the Society of the Plastics Trade determined to make use of the chasing arrows on plastic containers, its executives insisted the resin identification code was not meant to point recyclability. It additionally stated the code was not aimed toward shoppers.
Freeman says SPI selected the chasing arrows to tell apart the numbers from any others that may be discovered on containers, and that it was solely meant to assist recyclers type plastic resins from each other. “It was not an try to deceive folks that as a result of an merchandise had the code on it, it was recyclable,” he says.
However, trying again, Freeman acknowledges that recyclability is strictly what individuals took the code to imply. “That ended up being the presumption individuals drew—and nonetheless draw till this present day.”
What does “please recycle” actually imply?
Inside a number of months of its inception in 1988, the SPI code started catching on throughout the US. Colgate put it on its bottles for Palmolive and Ajax dishwashing liquids. P&G slapped it on Jif peanut butter jars, bottles of Crisco oil, Tide and Cheer laundry detergent bottles and tubs, and even on its plastic detergent measuring cups.
Together with the chasing arrows image along with the resin identification code on merchandise that couldn’t be recycled gave shoppers the impression that they might. “They’re constructed from polystyrene,” a P&G govt instructed reporters in regards to the plastic detergent measuring cups, which he claimed had been recyclable. “That’s quantity 6 on the plastic recycling code.” However native amenities didn’t settle for the cups, they usually weren’t recycled.
By the early Nineteen Nineties, on the urging of SPI, 39 states had enshrined the code as legislation on inflexible plastic containers. Corporations eagerly embraced the legislation, but in addition began placing the code on versatile plastic wrappers for every part from pantyhose to Subway sandwiches.
Some manufacturers had begun to make use of the exhortation “Please Recycle” alongside the chasing arrows image on plastic merchandise and packaging that couldn’t be recycled, claiming this was an academic effort. Surveys confirmed that almost all of shoppers thought that “Please Recycle” meant shoppers might recycle these merchandise in all or most communities within the U.S..
“Over time, even firms who initially opposed creating the code grabbed on to it and began placing it on every part,” says Freeman. “Corporations determined it was of their curiosity to look inexperienced, they usually ran with it. They ran with it till the cows got here residence.”
Excerpted with permission from Consumed: How Massive Manufacturers Acquired Us Hooked on Plastic by Saabira Chaudhuri. Revealed by association with Blink Publishing, an imprint of Bonnier Books UK. Copyright © 2025 Saabira Chaudhuri.
