The Resin Identification Code

What it is

Two marks, two audiences, two dates, and the confusion between them is the whole story.

The number is a material identifier. It tells a sorting facility which polymer a container is made of, which matters because polymers cannot be melted together. Nothing in the number says whether anybody collects that polymer.

The arrows are a recycling symbol. Gary Anderson designed them in 1970 as a twenty-three-year-old architecture student, winning Container Corporation of America's competition and a tuition grant. He tells Saabira Chaudhuri it was a marketing tool, and says he is saddened by the symbol's association with greenwashing but still thinks it useful. Both halves of what he says travel together.

How the two were joined, as the book reports it. Chaudhuri reports in Consumed that Lewis Freeman, then the Society of the Plastics Industry's head of government affairs, devised the code in 1988 and pushed it past internal opposition as a way to forestall mandatory regulation, and that by the early 1990s thirty-nine states had legislated it for rigid containers.

The handling rule here is absolute, and on a public page it resolves one way: this page states what is checkable about the mark and says nothing about anybody's intentions. Freeman's own account of the code, and his later comment on how shoppers read it, are both on the public record, in the book and in the NPR and PBS Frontline investigation of 11 September 2020, and they are held together in this publication's vault note rather than restated here. The Plastics Industry Association's position is the checkable part: that the code was never an indicator of recyclability and was designed to help facilities sort.

The reading, documented. "Please Recycle" was printed beside the arrows on packaging that was not recyclable, and surveys showed a majority read it as meaning they could. A 1993 report to senior Society of the Plastics Industry officials said the code was being misused as a green marketing tool. California banned the arrows in 2021 on products not regularly collected for recycling.

A mark for sorting machines had become a promise to shoppers.

In effect

In the government record: the number that proves the mark is not the system

In the Environmental Protection Agency's 2015 dataset, the United States rate for all plastics was 9.1 per cent, while polyethylene terephthalate bottles and jars ran at 29.9 per cent and high-density polyethylene natural bottles at 30.3 per cent. Every one of those containers carries a code. The code did not change; the market at the other end did.

In everyday life: the triangle on the yoghurt pot

A shopper reading a number inside three arrows is reading two marks at once and interpreting the pair as a claim about what happens next. On the evidence above, the number is a true statement about material and the arrows are not a statement about collection, and nothing on the packet distinguishes those two facts.

In law and in design: the ban and the redesign

California's 2021 prohibition on the arrows for products not regularly collected is the regulatory acknowledgement that the pair had been read as a promise. Which is the design lesson rather than a verdict: a mark intended for one reader will be read by whoever picks the object up, and the designer's and originator's own accounts both say so.

What it does not say

It does not say the code was a deception. Its originator's denial of deceptive intent and his concession about how it was read travel together, in that order, and this publication makes no accusation about any named individual.

It does not say the number is meaningless. It is an accurate material identifier, and sorting facilities use it.

It does not say shoppers were foolish. Surveys showed a majority read the mark as a recyclability claim, which is what the arrows were designed for, in a different decade, for a different purpose.

And it does not establish anybody's motive. Where this page reports what a company did, the claim is attributed to the published reporting that established it, and the industry's own stated position is printed beside it.

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