Conversation

"How the recycling symbol lost its meaning"

Note that the 1992 picture in this article shows a recycling center sorting plastics by type. That's the way it would have to work, and it's really impossible at scale.

The white cap on a plastic pill bottle should go in one bin, and the yellow pill bottle should go in another.

When things scaled up to everyone just throwing everything they remotely hoped was recyclable into one "recycling bin," the system failed.

https://grist.org/culture/recycling-symbol-logo-plastic-design/