The agency wants to stop using the “chasing arrows” logo on plastics that can’t be recycled. The man who designed it more than 50 years ago agrees that the symbol has been misused.

Updated 11:00 a.m. ET

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Gary Anderson was a 23-year-old architecture student at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1970, when he entered a design contest sponsored by a box manufacturer for a logo to promote the recycling of paper.

He won, spawning a symbol that became international shorthand for repurposing waste materials.

His design: three folded-over arrow strips, chasing each other in an endless triangle.

It wasn’t until the end of the decade that Mr. Anderson, now 75, saw his creation “take on a life of its own,” beyond his $2,500 prize earnings, he said in a phone interview last week. He recalled walking along a sidewalk in Amsterdam one day, turning a corner onto a neighborhood square to see a clutch of recycling bins stamped with his design.

Since then, manufacturers have put the logo on all types of products, not just paper items like cereal boxes and shopping bags.

“The symbol and I had different lives for a time,” said Mr. Anderson, a retired architecture and planning consultant in Baltimore, but he came to nurture a “pride of authorship.”

Now the environmental agency that oversees recycling efforts in the United States is saying that, after close to five decades in...

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