Meet the new ‘reuse’ symbol, a spiraling cousin to the ‘recycling’ icon

The lights drop, the first chord detonates, and somewhere in a stadium packed with 60,000 people you’re holding a cold beer. At a growing number of stadiums in the United States, your beverage cup isn’t made of flimsy plastic you’d toss into a bin on the way out. It’s a sturdy, reusable cup, designed to be handed back, washed, and ready for the next customer. This isn’t hypothetical. Coldplay served drinks in reusable cups during its Music of the Spheres World Tour, and Billie Eilish went a step further, writing reuse into her tour rider, from refillable bottles and mugs for the crew and water refill stations for fans. Getting that cup into your hand is enormously complicated—a tangle of collection hubs, wash facilities, digital tracking, contracts, and standards almost no one in the crowd will ever see. And today, consumers will become acquainted with a new icon that identifies a product as reusable. [Image: courtesy PR3] The symbol is being launched by an organization called PR3: The Global Alliance to Advance Reuse. It arrives amid mounting pressure over the plastic and climate crises and a growing recognition that recycling alone can’t solve a problem of this scale. Today only about 9% of plastic waste is recycled, while the rest is landfilled, burned, or lost to the environment. Reuse addresses this problem by keeping packaging in circulation, which could ultimately reduce the production of single-use packaging as well as the carbon emissions required to make them. It will take time for reuse to become as widespread as recycling. “I believe we’re close to a tipping point,” says Amy Larkin, PR3’s cofounder and director. But a crucial step to getting there is building awareness that these new systems exist— and the new symbol is instrumental to creating this new reality. [Image: courtesy PR3] A spiral, not a loop To find its new symbol, PR3 hosted an open competition in 2025 to crowdsource designs—a call