It was 1970 when Gary Anderson, a 23-year-old architecture student at the University of Southern California, saw a poster for a design competition. The task was to design a symbol for recycling in ...

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment.

Gary Anderson was a college kid in California when he saw the poster on a bulletin board. It was advertising a design competition to create a symbol that would let people know that the cardboard ...