No. The three arrows symbol is not an indication that an item can be recycled. The recycling symbol is unregulated, meaning that no authority controls who places the symbol on what product, be it recyclable or not.

The plastics industry uses the recycling symbol as an “in house” coding system to identify resin types. If you ask the plastics industry, they’ll tell you that the coding system isn’t intended for consumer use or to indicate recyclability. Of course, good recyclers are trained to look for the recycling symbol so it leads to confusion, but unfortunately you cannot use the symbol to determine whether or not a material is recyclable. Instead, you need to follow the guidelines for your community, not the labeling on the product. Technically, almost everything manufactured could be recyclable if there was a reliable end-buyer for the material. The existence of a recycling market is typically dependent upon a manufacturer buying the product back for remanufacture. When an industry distributes a product and then uses virgin materials to manufacture new products, it creates a glut of material without a recycling market. Therefore, for a material to be recyclable, there has to be a demand for it on the market, and that’s what determines what can and cannot be accepted.

On a related note: When you see a recycling symbol on a product to indicate that it is MADE from recycled content, you can trust that it was (though again, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is RECYCLABLE). We strongly encourage you to buy products with recycled content to further stimulate the market for recycled materials.