In California this year, some shoppers may turn over a plastic package and find something missing: the familiar triangle of chasing arrows.
Under a new state law, many products can no longer carry the recycling symbol unless companies can prove the material is actually collected, sorted, and reprocessed at scale. The arrows now have to answer to infrastructure, not aspiration.
That sounds like a narrow regulatory change. It is not. It marks the beginning of a broader cultural shift in how environmental responsibility is understood.
