How did packaging labelling get this complicated?

How the layers accumulated

A single package sold in Europe today can lawfully carry a material identification code from a 1997 Commission decision, a compostability seal certified against a 1990s Belgian scheme, a French sorting pictogram mandated in 2021, a financing trademark registered in 1990, and a recycling symbol drawn by a student in 1970 — while its seller’s website is policed under a consumer directive from 2024. None of these marks replaced any other. The complexity of packaging labelling is sedimentary: each era deposited its own layer of marks, made by different kinds of institution and directed at different purposes.

Four waves are distinguishable, each with its own institutional signature. Voluntary symbolism (1970–1987): designers and early ecolabels created marks without law. Systems and codes (1988–1997): producer responsibility and material identification generated the marks that still dominate by volume. The claims turn (1992–2019): regulation shifted from mandating marks to policing them. Harmonisation and confrontation (2020–present): Union law, state statutes and litigation began to collide on the same surface.

First wave: voluntary symbolism, 1970–1987

The foundational mark of the field was created by neither a government nor a standards body. In 1970 the Container Corporation of America sponsored a design contest, won by a 23-year-old student, Gary Anderson, whose three chasing arrows became the recycling symbol; the corporation's trademark application was challenged and abandoned, leaving the symbol free for anyone to use or modify (Recycling symbol, 2026). The consequences of that abandonment extend through the subsequent history of the field: the symbol entered circulation with no proprietor, no published definition and no body empowered to control its use, and regulators have continued to address that absence in the half-century since.

The first wave's second innovation was the state-backed voluntary ecolabel. Germany's Blue Angel, established in 1978 on the initiative of the federal interior ministry and launched "as the first environmental label worldwide with six product groups", awarded its first products in 1979 (Blauer Engel, n.d.). The Nordic countries followed collectively: in 1989 the Nordic Council of Ministers launched the Nordic Swan (Nordic Swan Ecolabel, n.d.). These schemes established the template of public sponsorship, published criteria and voluntary licensed use that ISO would later codify as the ecolabelling model. They were product labels rather than packaging labels, however, and nothing in the first wave addressed the disposal of a package at the point of discard.

Second wave: systems and codes, 1988–1997

The decade from 1988 produced most of the marks that dominate global packaging by sheer volume, and all of them originated as system infrastructure rather than consumer communication.

The resin identification code came first: developed by the Society of the Plastics Industry in 1988, a numeral inside chasing arrows identifying the polymer (ASTM International, 2010). The decision to enclose the numeral within borrowed arrows grafted the recycling symbol's connotations onto a code that asserts only material identity, a conflation that the US National Academies would still be identifying as a significant cause of consumer misunderstanding thirty-seven years later (National Academies, 2025).

Germany then invented the financing mark. Duales System Deutschland, founded on 28 September 1990 to relieve firms of the take-back obligations of the incoming packaging ordinance — the Verpackungsverordnung of 12 June 1991 — registered the Green Dot as its trademark in 1990 and began nationwide collection in 1991, "the first system of its kind worldwide" (Der Grüne Punkt, n.d.; Verpackungsverordnung, 1991). In 1995 DSD transferred a general European licence to the newly created PRO EUROPE (PRO EUROPE, n.d.), and the two-arrow symbol spread across the continent. The mark denoted, then as now, payment of a fee to the system rather than any property of the package, and was not read by consumers in those terms.

Japan built the third pillar: statutory material marking. Its recycling law of 1991 was reformed in June 2000 into the Law for Promotion of Effective Utilization of Resources, under which material identification marks became mandatory for plastic and paper packaging from April 2001 — PET bottles and metal cans having been mandated earlier — with obligations on container manufacturers and importers (GEC, n.d.; METI, n.d.). Japan thereby adopted, and maintained for the following two decades, a model under which the information that other systems left to voluntary choice was instead required by statute of named parties.

Europe attempted the same move and did not complete it. Directive 94/62/EC provided that packaging "shall indicate … the nature of the packaging material(s) used" and instructed the Council to decide on marking within two years (Directive 94/62/EC, Art. 8); the decision never came, and Commission Decision 97/129/EC delivered the identification system as "voluntary at least in a first stage" (Decision 97/129/EC). The first stage lasted twenty-eight years. In the gap, the certification industry arrived: the OK compost mark was created by the Belgian certifier Vinçotte in 1995, and DIN CERTCO began certifying compostable packaging in 1997 (Bioplastics Magazine, 2017; European Bioplastics, n.d.) — private marks filling spaces public law had left open.

By 1997, every major genus of packaging mark existed: the ownerless symbol, the state ecolabel, the material code, the financing trademark, the statutory mark, the certified seal. Everything since has been multiplication and regulation.

Third wave: the claims turn, 1992–2019

The third wave's signature was a change in regulatory posture: governments largely stopped creating marks and started policing them.

The United States moved first. The Federal Trade Commission issued its Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims in 1992, revising them in 1996, 1998 and 2012 (FTC, n.d.) — establishing the model of the claims regulator, for whom a recycling symbol is not infrastructure but a representation, permissible only when true in a defined sense. The Guides' operative test survives unchanged in the current code: an unqualified recyclable claim requires that facilities be "available to a substantial majority of consumers or communities where the item is sold", with substantial majority meaning "at least 60 percent" (16 CFR § 260.12). That threshold, issued as guidance rather than as a binding rule, was subsequently adopted by voluntary labeling schemes and, three decades later, written into California statute. ISO internationalised the underlying grammar between 1998 and 2006 with the 14020 series: general principles, self-declared claims, ecolabelling and environmental declarations (ISO, n.d.). Meanwhile the voluntary sector organised itself into networks and coalitions: the Global Ecolabelling Network from 1994 (GEN, n.d.), GreenBlue from 2002 and its Sustainable Packaging Coalition from 2004, whose How2Recycle labeling program began in 2008 (GreenBlue, n.d.; How2Recycle, n.d.), and OPRL, founded in 2009 by the British Retail Consortium and the Food and Drink Federation with WRAP, growing to more than 750 members (OPRL, n.d.). Germany ended the obligation to display the Green Dot in 2009, after which the financing mark continued in use as a trademark alone.

The wave crested in coalition rule-making at global scale: the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Global Commitment, launched with UN Environment in October 2018 with 250 signatories representing roughly a fifth of global plastic packaging (UNEP, 2018), and — just past this wave's edge — the Consumer Goods Forum's nine Golden Design Rules of July 2021, the ninth concerning on-pack recycling instructions (Consumer Goods Forum, 2021). By the wave's end the field combined an expanding apparatus of guidance, certification and voluntary coordination with marks whose legal status ranged from mandatory to undefined, and with the deficiencies in consumer comprehension documented by the 2020 UNEP/Consumers International global mapping (UNEP and Consumers International, 2020).

Fourth wave: harmonisation and confrontation, 2020–present

The current wave began when states concluded that neither voluntarism nor claims-policing was sufficient, and began to mandate, in different directions at once. Its opening years also brought the claims regulators fully into the field as enforcers rather than guides: the UK's Competition and Markets Authority published its Green Claims Code in September 2021, framing environmental claims as an application of existing consumer law (CMA, 2021); the US FTC took $5.5 million from Kohl's and Walmart over fibre claims in 2022 (FTC, 2022); and France's DGCCRF would go on to inspect more than 3,000 establishments for greenwashing across 2023–24, issuing over 430 injunctions (Gossement Avocats, 2025).

France created the Triman obligation through its 2020 anti-waste law and the implementing decree of June 2021, phasing in from January 2022 (Décret n° 2021-835, 2021). Italy mandated environmental labeling of all packaging from January 2023 (UL Solutions, 2023); Spain's decree required disposal-fraction labeling from January 2025 (Real Decreto 1055/2022). California legislated in the opposite register, deeming the chasing arrows a deceptive recyclability claim unless statewide criteria are met (Cal. Pub. Res. Code § 42355.51). The European Union then moved to end the fragmentation its own deferral had permitted: Regulation (EU) 2025/40 establishes a harmonised label, repealing the 1997 decision from August 2028 (Regulation (EU) 2025/40, recital 74), while Directive (EU) 2024/825 blacklisted sustainability labels not backed by certification or public establishment (Directive (EU) 2024/825).

The fourth wave's defining feature, however, is confrontation between the layers the earlier waves deposited. The Commission referred France to the Court of Justice in July 2025 over the very Triman obligation France had just perfected (Packaging Europe, 2025). A federal court preliminarily enjoined California's SB 343 in July 2026 on constitutional grounds (National Law Review, 2026); that statute restricts a symbol which the statutes of other states require (Plastics Industry Association, 2022). ISO, revising its labeling standards in 2022 and 2026, deprecated the "Type I/II/III" vocabulary that remains in general use across the field. And the attempt to take harmonisation global — the plastics treaty negotiations — adjourned in Geneva in August 2025 without consensus (UNEP, 2025). Each element of the present disorder consists of an earlier wave's settlement in collision with a later wave's correction.

What the history explains

Three features of the present, inexplicable synchronically, fall out of the history directly.

Why the chasing arrows carries no assigned meaning. The chasing arrows predate every governance structure in the field and escaped ownership at birth. Each subsequent wave built around the symbol rather than over it — the resin code borrowed it, claims law now polices it, harmonisation law tries to displace it — because no one has ever had the authority to simply assign it a meaning.

Why marks accumulate rather than replace. Each wave's marks are anchored in a different institution — trademark law, statute, contract, standard — so no single actor can retire another's layer. Germany could end its own Green Dot obligation; it could not, and cannot, remove the trademark from European commerce. The EU can repeal its 1997 decision; it cannot repeal Japan's marking law or FSC's licence conditions. Retirement requires the original depositor, and most original depositors have no incentive to act.

Why the current wave is litigious. For the first time, the layers are in direct legal conflict rather than mere coexistence: mandatory symbols in one jurisdiction are restricted symbols in another; a member state's mandate is a treaty violation in the Commission's eyes; a state statute is a First Amendment problem in a federal court's. The consequence is that new layers can no longer be deposited without disturbing those already in place.

A fourth observation concerns tempo. The first wave took nearly two decades to produce three durable marks; the fourth wave has produced more binding labeling law in six years than the previous fifty combined, and its instruments arrive already in tension with each other — France's decree phasing in from 2022 while the harmonised EU label that will displace it was being drafted, California restricting in 2021 the symbol the Green Guides had regulated since 1992 and other states had mandated since the early 1990s. Acceleration without retirement is accordingly the fourth wave's signature, and it accounts for a position in which individual instruments are drafted more precisely than their predecessors while the number of instruments simultaneously in force continues to rise.

What the history indicates about resolution is that it would require not improved design but the alignment of the four kinds of authority — legal, standard-setting, ownership and de facto — that the four waves distributed to different hands. The waves ran from 1970 to the present, and that alignment remains incomplete.

References

ASTM International (2010) 'Resin identification', Standardization News, November/December. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Bioplastics Magazine (2017) TÜV Austria takes over OK Compost label from Vinçotte, 8 December. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Blauer Engel (n.d.) Ecolabel history. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Cal. Pub. Res. Code § 42355.51. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) (2021) Green claims code: making environmental claims. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Commission Decision 97/129/EC of 28 January 1997 establishing the identification system for packaging materials. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Consumer Goods Forum (2021) CGF Plastic Waste Coalition launches full set of Golden Design Rules, 13 July. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Décret n° 2021-835 du 29 juin 2021 relatif à l'information des consommateurs sur la règle de tri des déchets. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Der Grüne Punkt (n.d.) About us. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Directive 94/62/EC of 20 December 1994 on packaging and packaging waste. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Directive (EU) 2024/825 of 28 February 2024, OJ L, 2024/825, 6.3.2024. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

FTC (Federal Trade Commission) (n.d.) Green Guides. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

FTC (Federal Trade Commission) (2022) $5.5 million total FTC settlements with Kohl's and Walmart. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Gossement Avocats (2025) Greenwashing: la répression des fraudes publie le bilan de ses enquêtes 2023 et 2024. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

GEC (Global Environment Centre Foundation) (n.d.) Japanese environmental laws and support systems. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

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How2Recycle (n.d.) About. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) (n.d.) Catalogue records for the ISO 14020 series. Available at: Open source and related pages (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan) (n.d.) Identification marks on containers and packaging [pamphlet]. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2025) Municipal Solid Waste Recycling in the United States: Analysis of Current and Alternative Approaches. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi:10.17226/27978.

National Law Review (2026) California SB 343 enforcement preliminarily enjoined. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Nordic Swan Ecolabel (n.d.) The Nordic Swan Ecolabel. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

OPRL (n.d.) About OPRL. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Packaging Europe (2025) EU Commission refers France to Court of Justice. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Plastics Industry Association (2022) State Resin Identification Regulation Survey, May. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

PRO EUROPE (n.d.) The Green Dot trademark. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Real Decreto 1055/2022, de 27 de diciembre, de envases y residuos de envases. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Recycling symbol (2026) Wikipedia. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Regulation (EU) 2025/40 of 19 December 2024 on packaging and packaging waste, OJ L, 2025/40, 22.1.2025. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

UL Solutions (2023) Italy environmental labeling requirements for packaging. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

UNEP (2018) A line in the sand: global commitment to eliminate plastic pollution at source, 29 October. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

UNEP (2025) Fifth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (resumed), INC-5.2. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

UNEP and Consumers International (2020) "Can I Recycle This?" A Global Mapping and Assessment of Standards, Labels and Claims on Plastic Packaging. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Verpackungsverordnung (1991) Verordnung über die Vermeidung von Verpackungsabfällen, 12 June 1991, BGBl. I S. 1234. Record available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

16 CFR § 260.12 (Recyclable claims). Available at: Open source (Accessed: 17 August 2026).

Note on sources and verification

The Mobius loop's origin story rests on the encyclopedia article cited, which in turn derives from a 1999 account in Resource Recycling by Jones and Powell; it is well-attested secondary history rather than primary record. The Green Dot's 1990 trademark registration year is stated on PRO EUROPE's trademark page as retrieved during research conducted for this article, though one verification pass could not relocate it there. The end of Germany's Green Dot display obligation in 2009 is widely documented in industry sources but was not verified against the amending ordinance. Japan's pre-2001 mandate dates for PET bottles and cans are described in the METI pamphlet as "previously mandated" without stated years; a commonly cited 1993 start for the PET mark could not be verified. How2Recycle's beginning is dated to 2008 per its own site. The founding year sometimes given for the Biodegradable Products Institute (1999) could not be verified and is omitted.

Last verified: 17 August 2026.