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 ...

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, ...

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. ...

WASHINGTON — A symbol called a “mobius loop” or the “chasing arrows” is universally recognized as a sign to recycle. Many people assume that a product being stamped with that symbol means it can be ...

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.

For most of the last decade, recycling felt like a stable habit. You sorted your bottles, flattened your cardboard, and ...