Editor’s note: This story is provided by Aspen Journalism, a nonprofit, investigative news organization. For more,visit aspenjournalism.org. As a shy and bearded young architecture student at the ...

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 ...

Gary Anderson was studying architecture at the University of Southern California when he saw the poster. It was 1970, and environmentalism was in the air, along with a broader antiestablishment vibe. ...

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 ...

When I visited my friend in Scotland, I was amazed to see how little waste from her family of four actually went into the garbage can. Besides their good habits of buying items with minimal packaging, ...

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.

The "chasing arrows" logo is universally recognized as a sign to recycle, but the Environmental Protection Agency is now saying it's also universally confusing. It's recommending tossing the symbol ...

It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment. “It’s crazy what we’re doing. It’s very, very, very bad,” she says in ABC’s prime-time ...