Protect life on Earth
A hazard symbol for the chemicals that do their damage quietly, chronically, and across generations. Now an international standard.
A four-minute introduction
Why endocrine disruptors need a hazard symbol of their own, and what this one is designed to do.
Poison you cannot taste, on a timescale you cannot see
Endocrine disrupting chemicals interfere with the hormonal systems that govern development, fertility, behaviour, and metabolism. They are found throughout household and industrial products, and many belong to a class of persistent organic pollutants known as forever chemicals: they do not break down, and they are extremely difficult to remove from the environment, from food chains, or from bodies.
Their effects are insidious. Rather than presenting as a poisoning, they surface as idiopathic hormone imbalance: cancers, birth defects, infertility, obesity, mood and cognitive change. Symptoms that look like ordinary degenerative disease, or like nothing anyone would call a disease at all.
Worse, the damage carries. Exposure can reach the children and even the grandchildren of the exposed. We are leaving a devastating legacy for our descendants, and the quantity and variety of these chemicals grows every year.
Existing pictograms do not capture this. The generic serious health hazard symbol says nothing about persistence, nothing about inheritance, and nothing about harm that accrues over a lifetime. A chemical class this distinctive warrants a warning of its own.
Chronic, not acute
The harm accumulates over years of low-dose exposure, so it never registers as a poisoning event that a warning label would normally cover.
Inherited
Effects can persist through generations, reaching children and grandchildren who were never exposed to the original source.
Persistent
Forever chemicals do not degrade. A contaminated site, product, or water table stays contaminated on a civilisational timescale.
Unlabelled
A standard symbol makes EDCs visible to consumers, workplaces, world trade, and regulators for the first time.
One mark to warn. One to reassure.
The hazard mark is all blades and points. Its counterpart, for products made without endocrine disruptors, is the same trefoil redrawn in soft, rounded, living forms. You can tell them apart before you can read either. Both ship in four consistent styles.
EDC Hazard Symbol
Endocrine disruptors are present in this product, process, or place.
EDC-Free Symbol
Made without endocrine disrupting chemicals. Rounded where the hazard mark is sharp, and green where it is amber.
Danger you read before you understand it
- Central hexagon
- A stylised dioxin molecule: the archetype of a persistent organic pollutant, sitting at the heart of the mark.
- Three radiative blades
- Congenital defects, infertility, and chronic disease. The three harms an endocrine disruptor carries through a life, and onward into the next.
- Trefoil geometry
- It echoes the radiological and biological hazard trefoils, so the mark is instinctively unnerving to anyone who has never been taught what it means. Danger. Stay away.
Built to outlast the people who drew it
Forever chemicals oblige us to think past our own civilisation. A drum buried today will still be dangerous when the language on its label has been forgotten, and the sign above it has spent a century in the weather.
So the standard ships a weathered variant: the mark as it will look eroded, corroded, and half legible. If the geometry still reads as a warning after that, the symbol has done its job.
It drops into the frames the world already uses
The mark was drawn to sit inside the existing hazard signage systems rather than compete with them, so a regulator, a shipper, or a factory can adopt it without inventing anything new.
Shipping and supply
The red diamond used on drums, containers, and safety data sheets worldwide.
Zones and premises
The warning triangle used for contaminated areas and workplace signage.
Equipment and plant
The North American panel format for machinery and industrial process labels.
Consumer products
The counterpart mark, for goods certified to contain no endocrine disruptors.
Take the symbol and use it
Both marks, in all four styles, as SVG, layered Illustrator artwork, and PNG at 48, 512, and 2048 pixels, with technical drawings for reproduction on a grid.
Symbol and icon sets
The complete kit: hazard and EDC-Free marks in colour, fill, outline, and weathered, plus the supporting icon library.
Download ZIP SVG · AI · PNG · approx. 17 MBThe standard
IEEE 3173-2026, the Standard for Endocrine Disrupting Chemical Hazard Labelling.
Open at IEEE SA IEEE Standards AssociationTechnical drawings
Construction drawings for both marks, dimensioned on the grid, for accurate reproduction at any scale. Included in the kit.
Get the drawings JPG · AIA note on using the marks
The symbol is offered freely to support adoption of the standard. If you intend to apply it to your own products, packaging, or premises, please follow the conditions of use set out in IEEE 3173 so that the mark means the same thing everywhere it appears.
An international standard, not a proposal
What began as a design brief is now IEEE 3173-2026, the Standard for Endocrine Disrupting Chemical Hazard Labelling, taken through the IEEE Standards Association. That matters, because a hazard symbol only works if it means one thing, everywhere, to everyone.
A standardised mark lets EDCs be accounted for across consumer awareness, industrial safety, world trade, and ethical production, for the first time.
The symbol was designed by Nell Watson, Vlad Arabadzhi, and Kosturanov, with the IEEE 3173 Working Group, 2021-26.
The world's largest technical professional organisation, and the publisher of the standard that defines this mark.
Read the standardDemand that this label exists
Spread the standard, and ask for endocrine disruptors to be labelled on the products you buy. A symbol is only as strong as the number of people who recognise it.