Recycling Click a picture to enhance it. Blue text = a clickable linkWriting last week about Earth Day, Saturday April 22, I said that the first Earth Day was held in 1970. Then I found out that in conjunction with that first Earth Day, the Container Corporation of America, a large manufacturer of recycled paperboard, decided to run a public domain competition for high school and college art and design students, to find an icon to represent reycling – an icon the company could reproduce on their products. This week I'm writing about that competition and what followed. The competition
What is the Mobius Strip'The Mobius strip is a structure whose single surface is made continuous by twisting a flat surface once and joining the ends, and was formally articulated in the 19th century by German mathematician August Mobius. The rhetoric of sustainability that Anderson finds embodied in the Mobius strip is already linked to environmentalism when Anderson designed the recycling symbol.' Everywhere We can admire this clever logo for its own sake, especially as we know it was made before computers. Traditional aids such as set squares, straight edges, protractors and compasses were Anderson's tools. What is truly remarkable though, is, that a design which won a 1970 competition of only 500 entries, is now used and recognised, all over the world. Wikipedia says of Gary Anderson: 'His design for a symbol to embody the concept of recycling has been compared to iconic trademarks such as those for Coca-Cola and Nike.' That's impressive. But personally, I'm the more impressed that I'm sitting here at my desk looking at a locally made hard-boarded diary which bears Gary Anderson's logo on its cover. 1970 to 2023. University of Southern California, USA, to a suburban house, in Ngaio, Wellington, New Zealand, That's not a bad travel record. My diary's logo is not quite identical with Gary's original. It's a variant. But it's here! VariantsIn a story entitled 'Gary Anderson Has been found', two jounalists, Penny Jones and Jerry Powell who had been looking for the adult Gary Anderson for some time, after he dropped out of sight, have written about him in some detail. They interviewed him about all the variants there are now. This is what he thinks.
AchivementOne of the pleasures I gain from blogging is discovering the names and stories of achievers I had no idea about – especially achievers who have 'done good' in the world. Gary Anderson is one of those. If you share my interest, you might like to hear a nine minute interview with Anderson which I heard on BBC's Witness History programme just a week or two ago. Click ‘The universal recycling symbol - Witness History - BBC’ then click ‘Listen Now’. Good listening! □ John McInnes Friday 28 April 2023 ##########
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