This is an excerpt from Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic.

An odd symbol, made up of three arrows arranged in a triangle, began showing up on plastic containers across America in the fall of 1988. Inside it was a number.

The idea to put codes on plastic containers came from the Society of the Plastics Industry. By 1987, Lewis Freeman, the trade body’s head of government affairs, had begun hearing that the fledgling plastics recycling industry was struggling to make sense of the dozens of different types of plastics they were receiving. The plastics had different melting points and other properties, which meant they couldn’t just be mixed together for recycling.

“Plastics is not really one material; it’s umpteen materials,” explains Freeman. “While plastics share a similar molecular structure and most are made from oil or natural gas, they’re otherwise quite different from one another.”

Before he joined SPI in 1979, Freeman worked as a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, fighting Senator Ted Kennedy’s push to break up big oil companies. At SPI, where he stayed for more than 20 years, Freeman dealt with anything that could pose a reputational risk to the plastics industry. He spent much of his time convincing companies to make changes that would forestall the risk of regulation. 

When it emerged that dozens of babies each year were dying by drowning in large plastic buckets—at five gallons, the buckets were so heavy that if an infant fell into them, they didn’t tip over—Freeman was the man who rallied the industry to hand out warning stickers to parents buying the buckets. The companies, he remembers, didn’t want to add permanent labels, which made the buckets a few cents more expensive. Eventually, they capitulated when it became apparent their legal liability was enormous.

“Companies are essentially all the same regardless of industry,” says Freeman. “They don’t like to be told by someone else that they need to do something, period.”

A symbol to aid recyclers—not consumers

Back in 1987, Freeman took the complaints he was hearing about recycling to SPI’s public affairs committee. Since the industry saw recycling as a tool to mitigate reputational damage, the public affairs group, consisting of men from big packaging makers like Owens-Illinois and the American Can Company, was the natural place to discuss it.

The dizzying array of plastics on the market was hardly the only issue plaguing recycling. Plastic’s popularity came down to it being light, cheap, versatile, and robust. But being light and cheap hurt on the other end. Haulers, who were paid by the ton to collect recycling, made far more money filling their trucks with heavier aluminum or cardboard than with lightweight plastic. 

Things were worse for some plastics than others. Polystyrene foam was economically unviable because it was mostly air. Plastic bags, wraps, and films also had to be collected separately, or they gummed up sorting machinery. Packaging makers preferred virgin over recycled plastic since it was better quality and usually cheaper. If there were no buyers, it didn’t matter how technically recyclable something was—it wasn’t going to be recycled. Back in the late 1980s, only containers made from PET—the plastic used in single-use drink bottles—and HDPE—commonly used to make milk jugs and detergent containers—were being recycled in any significant volume. (The situation remains the same today.)

These plastics weren’t turned into new soda bottles or milk jugs, but instead downcycled into lower-grade construction material that was just one step removed from the landfill. All the other kinds of plastics went straight to landfills or incinerators, if they weren’t littered.

Slapping a code on the bottom of plastic containers wouldn’t fix most of these problems. But at least it would help recyclers know what they were dealing with, Freeman told SPI’s public affairs committee. 

Many plastic resin producers in the room were against the idea. They feared that including a code would encourage consumer goods 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 preferred to sit on their hands until they had a legislative gun pointing at their heads. “The bottle manufacturers opposed it because it required them to do something,” he says.

Freeman eventually prevailed. He insisted the code was a way to forestall mandatory regulation that could be far more expensive and onerous. For plastics that weren’t currently being recycled, the code was the first step towards enabling this, he added, since it meant they could be more easily sorted.

And so the “resin identification code,” as the industry called it, was created in 1988. While there were dozens of different types and subtypes of plastics, SPI—looking to keep costs and complexity low—grouped them into seven broad categories, which still stand today. 

They are:

• Polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used for soda and water bottles
• High-density polyethylene (HDPE), used for milk jugs, detergent containers, and shopping bags
• Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), used for credit cards and pill packs
• Low-density polyethylene (LDPE), used for disposable gloves, trash bags, and dry-cleaning bags
• Polypropylene (PP), used for yogurt tubs, takeaway boxes, and butter containers
• Polystyrene (PS): the solid kind is used to make disposable cutlery and cups, while the expanded kind (EPS) is used for foam egg cartons, meat trays, and fast-food containers
• Other plastics: a catch-all for remaining plastics including multilayer packages like pet food pouches and ketchup sachets that incorporate different types of plastic, as well as bioplastics

“It was a marketing tool”

To separate the number from other descriptors used on containers, SPI enclosed it in the chasing arrows symbol. 

It was a strange choice, one that would cast doubts over the plastics industry’s motives for decades to come.

Back in 1970, Gary Anderson, a 23-year-old architecture student at the University of Southern California, had seen an enormous wall-sized poster advertising a design competition. Sponsored by Container Corp., a paper packaging maker that was also the largest paper recycler in the U.S., the competition required participants to design a symbol “for the love of earth” to “symbolize the recycling process.”

Anderson’s design—featuring three arrows twisting and returning into themselves—won. He got a $2,500 tuition grant and a trip to Chicago in September 1970 to attend a press conference at Container Corp.’s headquarters. 

“I was kind of an arrogant little punk student, and I thought the whole thing was kind of silly, actually,” recalls Anderson, who back then sported a goatee and wore his red hair—bleached blond by the California sun—in curtains parted slightly to the side.

Through the 1960s, the paper industry—much like plastics would later—had faced mounting criticism about how its disposable products were flowing to landfills. Container Corp. made the new chasing arrows symbol available to the entire paper industry for use on shipping containers and folding cartons, saying it hoped the symbol would spread awareness about the importance of paper recycling.

“It was a marketing tool,” explains Anderson.

Despite this, in 1988, when the Society of the Plastics Industry decided to use the chasing arrows on plastic containers, its executives insisted the resin identification code was not meant to indicate recyclability. It also said the code was not aimed at consumers.

Freeman says SPI chose the chasing arrows to distinguish the numbers from any others that might be found on containers, and that it was only meant to help recyclers sort plastic resins from one another. “It was not an attempt to deceive people that because an item had the code on it, it was recyclable,” he says. 

But, looking back, Freeman acknowledges that recyclability is exactly what people took the code to mean. “That ended up being the presumption people drew—and still draw until this day.”

What does “please recycle” really mean?

Within a few months of its inception in 1988, the SPI code began catching on across 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.

Including the chasing arrows symbol together with the resin identification code on products that couldn’t be recycled gave consumers the impression that they could. “They are made from polystyrene,” a P&G executive told reporters about the plastic detergent measuring cups, which he claimed were recyclable. “That’s number 6 on the plastic recycling code.” But local facilities didn’t accept the cups, and they were not recycled.

By the early 1990s, at the urging of SPI, 39 states had enshrined the code as law on rigid plastic containers. Companies eagerly embraced the law, but also started putting the code on flexible plastic wrappers for everything from pantyhose to Subway sandwiches.

Some brands had begun to use the exhortation “Please Recycle” alongside the chasing arrows symbol on plastic products and packaging that couldn’t be recycled, claiming this was an educational effort. Surveys showed that the majority of consumers thought that “Please Recycle” meant consumers could recycle those products in all or most communities in the U.S..

“Over time, even companies who initially opposed developing the code grabbed on to it and started putting it on everything,” says Freeman. “Companies decided it was in their interest to look green, and they ran with it. They ran with it until the cows came home.”

Excerpted with permission from Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic by Saabira Chaudhuri. Published by arrangement with Blink Publishing, an imprint of Bonnier Books UK. Copyright © 2025 Saabira Chaudhuri.