The dirty truth about the iconic recycling label—and how Big Plastic spread the lie for years

Corporations sold Americans on the chasing arrows—while stripping the logo of its worth.

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 Earth Day special, letting out heavy sighs and listing jumbled statistics about deforestation and the hole in the ozone layer.