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The chasing arrows: who owns it, and what does it legally mean?
Marks and reference graphics are shown for identification, academic research and commentary. The image does not grant permission to apply a scheme mark to packaging; consult the issuing body's current eligibility and artwork rules.
Introduction
The three folded arrows in a triangle are among the most widely used graphics on consumer packaging. Some statutes require the symbol. Others treat it as presumptively deceptive. International standards address it. At the date of this article it is also the subject of federal litigation in the United States. It has no proprietor, no administering body and no single authoritative definition.
Origin and the absence of proprietary control
The symbol's origin is documented in secondary sources rather than in primary record. In 1970 the Container Corporation of America sponsored a design competition for a symbol to identify recycled-content paperboard. The winning entry, submitted by Gary Anderson, then a twenty-three-year-old architecture student, arranged three folded arrows in a Möbius configuration. The corporation applied to register the design as a trademark; the application was challenged and subsequently abandoned, with the consequence that the symbol passed into the public domain and may be used or modified without licence, royalty or permission (Recycling symbol, 2026).
The absence of proprietary control has consequences for the symbol's semantics that distinguish it from the other mark families examined in this theme. A registered mark has a proprietor with standing to define its meaning and to restrain uses inconsistent with that definition. PRO EUROPE, for example, states that the Green Dot "is a financing symbol and not an environmental symbol" and that its presence "indicates that a financial contribution has been paid to a nationally authorised take-back system" (PRO EUROPE, n.d.); the proposition is contested in practice, as the Green Dot article sets out, but a party exists to advance it. No equivalent custodian exists for the chasing arrows. The symbol's meaning has been determined instead by the aggregate practice of its users and, subsequently, by regulators seeking to constrain uses already established in the market.
Legal status across jurisdictions
Because the symbol is unowned, its legal status is a function of the regime applying to a given use. Four positions may be distinguished, and more than one may obtain within a single national market.
Statutory mandate: the resin identification code
The symbol's largest single application arises from a use its designer did not contemplate. When the Society of the Plastics Industry established the resin identification code in 1988, it placed the code's numerals within chasing arrows (ASTM International, 2010). Legislatures in the United States subsequently incorporated the code into statute. The Plastics Industry Association's 2022 survey of state law reports that plastic product identification is or has been required in forty states, that thirty-six currently require it for at least some products, and that twenty-nine specify a symbol including chasing arrows in the statutory text (Plastics Industry Association, 2022). In those jurisdictions the display of the arrows is a legal obligation attached to the container rather than a discretionary marketing choice.
The standards body that later assumed administration of the code has since sought to separate it from the recycling connotation. ASTM D7611 states that "Resin Identification Codes are not 'recycle codes'", prohibits the placement of terms such as "recyclable" in proximity to the code, and replaced the chasing-arrows enclosure with a solid equilateral triangle (ASTM International, n.d.; 2013). Most state statutes have not been amended correspondingly. The consequence is a divergence between statutory specification and the current technical standard, examined further in the resin-codes article.
Statutory restriction: deemed-deceptive use
California legislated in the opposite direction. Public Resources Code § 42355.51, enacted by SB 343 in 2021, prohibits the sale or distribution of any product or packaging bearing a deceptive or misleading claim regarding recyclability, and deems the chasing-arrows symbol — or "any other symbol or statement indicating the product or packaging is recyclable" — deceptive unless statutory criteria are satisfied, including collection access for at least sixty per cent of the state's population and sorting by facilities serving at least sixty per cent of those programmes (Cal. Pub. Res. Code § 42355.51). In July 2026 a federal district court preliminarily enjoined enforcement of the statute, finding several provisions likely to be unconstitutionally vague and the statute likely to fail intermediate scrutiny under the commercial-speech doctrine (National Law Review, 2026; Jones Day, 2026). The injunction restrains enforcement pending litigation; the statute remains in force as enacted, and the general prohibition on deceptive claims under consumer-protection law is unaffected.
Federal treatment is of longer standing. The Federal Trade Commission's Green Guides treat the symbol as a recyclability claim, permissible without qualification only where "recycling facilities are available to a substantial majority of consumers or communities where the item is sold", the term "substantial majority" being defined as "at least 60 percent" (16 CFR § 260.12).
Standards conditioning: ISO 14021
International standardisation addresses the symbol under the designation "Mobius loop". ISO 14021 governs its use in self-declared environmental claims: the loop displayed without a percentage figure constitutes a claim of recyclability, and the loop accompanied by a percentage constitutes a claim of recycled content. The standard imposes a qualification requirement where infrastructure is limited: if collection facilities "are not conveniently available to a reasonable proportion of purchasers", a qualified claim is required, the qualification must "adequately convey the limited availability of collection facilities", and generalised formulations such as "Recyclable where facilities exist" are stated to be inadequate (ISO, 1999, cl. 7.7.2). The clause's provisions and their operationalisation in national law are treated in the Mobius loop article.
Unregulated use
Where none of the foregoing regimes applies, use of the symbol is unrestricted. The 2020 global mapping of plastic packaging labels prepared for the One Planet Network documented inconsistent worldwide use and recommended that "the use of the 'chasing arrows' symbol should be restricted to only indicating recyclability of packaging" (UNEP and Consumers International, 2020). The recommendation presupposes that no such restriction generally obtains.
Evidence on consumer interpretation
The consumer-comprehension evidence relating to the symbol is more extensive than for most marks examined in this theme, and is consistent in direction across sources.
The most authoritative synthesis is the consensus study on municipal solid waste recycling published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2025, which states that "inconsistent and misleading packaging labels, including the use of the chasing arrows symbol and resin identification codes, are significant causes of consumer uncertainty and misunderstanding", and that "many consumers are confused by on-product resin identification codes, which use the chasing arrows symbol around a number 1 through 7, as an indicator of a product's recyclability" (National Academies, 2025). The committee recommended the development of a national recycling label standard. Survey evidence is directionally consistent: research published by The Recycling Partnership in 2021, based on a sample of 1,310 United States consumers, reports that of the seventy-eight per cent who consult labels, sixty-three per cent "report confusion about whether an item is recyclable after looking at the product label" (The Recycling Partnership, 2021). That figure is not disaggregated by symbol and therefore cannot be attributed to the arrows specifically.
The mechanism proposed in this literature is that the symbol was devised to denote recycling, was subsequently adopted by the resin code to denote polymer identity, and continues to be read in its original sense within the borrowed context. On that account, the accumulated association is not displaced by a disclaimer in a technical standard. The regulatory disagreement documented in the following section may accordingly be characterised as a disagreement over which of three courses law should follow: the standard, by retiring the arrows from the code; consumer understanding, by treating the arrows as a claim and holding users to the applicable threshold; or the incumbent statutes, by continuing to mandate the symbol.
Areas of regulatory conflict
Three conflicts turn on the symbol, each corresponding to a different structural feature of labeling governance.
The first is intergovernmental. The twenty-nine states specifying arrows within resin-code statutes and California's deemed-deception provision cannot both be satisfied by uniform national packaging except through qualification strategies whose adequacy is contested. Federal preemption legislation introduced in 2026 responds to this divergence, as does the revision by How2Recycle of its own label system to confine arrows iconography to its highest tier (GreenBlue, 2025).
The second is between standard and statute. ASTM's solid-triangle specification has been the standard's graphic since the 2013 revision (ASTM International, 2013), while most statutes continue to specify arrows. Neither body can resolve the divergence unilaterally: ASTM cannot amend state legislation, and no legislature is obliged to track revisions to a private standard.
The third concerns the relationship between the symbol and the systems that determine outcomes. The symbol asserts, at most, a property of the package, whereas whether recycling occurs depends on collection, sortation and end markets external to it. The regimes surveyed above address this by interposing infrastructure thresholds between the symbol and its permissible use: sixty per cent access under the Green Guides and under California's statutory criteria, and scheme-specific thresholds under How2Recycle and OPRL. An unowned symbol has thus acquired constraint not through an owner but through an accumulated perimeter of external conditions.
Institutional withdrawal from the symbol
Independently of regulatory action, institutions with discretion over the symbol's use have progressively restricted it. The pattern is documented here because it is observable across bodies with differing interests.
The standards custodian acted first: the revision replacing the arrows enclosure with a solid triangle was directed at separating the resin code from the recycling connotation (ASTM International, 2013). Voluntary labeling schemes followed. OPRL's United Kingdom system is organised around word-led binary labels rather than arrows iconography. In the most extensive instance, the 2025–26 redesign of How2Recycle's label system removed the chasing arrows from all label tiers other than "Widely Recyclable" — the category for which the scheme's access criteria support an unqualified claim — and removed the terms recycle, recyclable and recycling from its instruction tabs (GreenBlue, 2025). The scheme's published material associates the redesign with California's statute and its compliance date.
International policy recommendations point in the same direction. The 2020 UNEP and Consumers International mapping recommended restricting the symbol to the indication of recyclability (UNEP and Consumers International, 2020), and the National Academies' proposed remedy for the confusion it documented is a national label standard (National Academies, 2025). None of these developments reaches the symbol's largest reservoir of use, the statutory resin codes, which remain governed by unamended legislation.
The litigation and the institutional pattern address different questions. The issue in California League of Food Producers v. Bonta is whether a state may compel restriction of the symbol consistently with the First Amendment (National Law Review, 2026). The institutional record described above concerns the separate question of what bodies with discretion have elected to do. Packaging bearing the arrows at the date of this article will therefore fall into one of three categories: a mandated resin code, a scheme's highest-confidence tier, or artwork predating the restrictions described.
Limits of the assertion
The propositions the symbol does not establish may be stated directly.
The symbol does not establish that the package is recyclable. In its resin-code application it denotes polymer identity, and the governing standard states that the codes are not recycling codes (ASTM International, n.d.). It does not establish recycled content, which under ISO 14021 requires the accompanying percentage figure; the absence of that figure is therefore informative. It does not establish that any local facility accepts the item, the threshold regimes described above having been adopted on the premise that acceptance is frequently unavailable. It does not indicate participation in a take-back or producer-responsibility financing scheme, which is the function of the Green Dot, a mark with which the arrows are documented as being confused (the Green Dot article). It carries no certification: no audit, licence or conformity assessment attaches to it.
What remains is conditional. In regulated contexts the symbol constitutes a claim whose conditions are set by the regime governing the transaction; outside those contexts it carries no defined content. The consumer-protection litigation examined in the claims and enforcement theme arises within the interval between the meanings attributed to the symbol by readers and the propositions any party is prepared to substantiate.
Summary
The chasing arrows differs from the other marks examined in this theme in the source of its discipline. Certification and trademark families are constrained by proprietors with an interest in the mark's meaning; disposal labels are constrained by scheme thresholds; mandated codes are constrained by statutory definition. The chasing arrows is constrained only externally, by regimes addressing particular uses within particular jurisdictions. Its regulatory history accordingly consists of successive partial containments rather than a settled definition. The trajectory indicated by the EU's harmonised-pictogram programme and by the National Academies' recommendation is toward purpose-built sorting marks assuming the communicative function, with the arrows persisting in uses that regulation has not reached. The property established in the symbol's first year — that no party holds rights in it — remains the principal determinant of its subsequent legal history.
References
ASTM International (n.d.) ASTM D7611/D7611M: Standard Practice for Coding Plastic Manufactured Articles for Resin Identification. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
ASTM International (2010) 'Resin identification', Standardization News, November/December. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
ASTM International (2013) 'Modernizing the resin identification code', Standardization News, July/August. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
Cal. Pub. Res. Code § 42355.51. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
GreenBlue (2025) Pro label rollout. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
International Organization for Standardization (1999) ISO 14021:1999 Environmental labels and declarations — Self-declared environmental claims. Geneva: ISO. Text as adopted in IS/ISO 14021:1999, available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
Jones Day (2026) Federal court pauses California's SB 343 recyclability labeling law. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 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: 18 August 2026).
Plastics Industry Association (2022) State Resin Identification Regulation Survey, May. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
PRO EUROPE (n.d.) The Green Dot trademark. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
Recycling symbol (2026) Wikipedia. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
The Recycling Partnership (2021) Consumer Research on Recycling Behavior and Attitudes Regarding On-Pack Labeling. Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 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: 18 August 2026).
16 CFR § 260.12 (Recyclable claims). Available at: Open source (Accessed: 18 August 2026).
Note on sources and verification
The account of the symbol's origin — the 1970 competition, Anderson's design, and the challenged and abandoned trademark application — rests on the encyclopedia article cited, which in turn derives from a 1999 account published in Resource Recycling; it constitutes attested secondary history rather than primary record. The date of ASTM's change of graphic from chasing arrows to solid triangle is attributed in secondary sources to the 2013 revision and was not confirmed against edition text. ISO 14021 is cited to the 1999 edition, whose text is publicly retrievable; subsequent editions may renumber the clauses cited. The characterisation of the SB 343 injunction derives from the two legal analyses cited rather than from the court's order. The figure of sixty-three per cent reported by The Recycling Partnership is not disaggregated by symbol and is presented here without attribution to the chasing arrows specifically. The proposed mechanism for consumer misinterpretation is drawn from the sources cited in that section and is identified in the text as their account rather than as an independent finding.
Last verified: 18 August 2026.