This is one of our favorite days of the year…..
A few times a year, public school art teachers come to Boxcar Press to pick up our overstocked paper, offcuts, excess envelopes, cool boxes, and other odds and ends that can be transformed by students into art. The supplies we donate are met with such enthusiasm from the art teachers….though art budgets vary from school to school, we’re told by some teachers that they only have about $.70 to spend per student on art supplies for the year(!). We love our little community of Syracuse, and we love doing things like this that help us feel connected to where we work and live. Also, though recycling is good, reusing materials is even better…..we hope this will spark some good donation ideas for other letterpress shops. If you have other cool ideas about how to re-use your extra letterpress Stuff, we’d love to hear about it! (Our great neighbors Partners for Arts Education help organize all of this….thanks, Partners!) (photos by Carol, our operations manager. Thanks, Carol!)
Archive for the ‘eco’ Category
Last month, Boxcar Press launched BPPPPRP, a photopolymer plate recycling program to help keep letterpress plates out of landfills. We’re now working to set up drop boxes at several book arts centers across the country, so plates used by the centers’ students & members can be collected and recycled. Thank you to Sarah Nichols, the program manager at Center for Book Arts (CBA), for setting up a box for photopolymer plate recycling last week at CBA. The box is in the vicinity of CBA’s presses, and plates will be collected and sent to Boxcar Press every so often for recycling. Way to go, CBA!
We had to say goodbye to a whole lot of polymer when our recycling guys came for pick-up. We sent away two 40 x 48 x 48 containers: one for steel-backed plates, and one for plastic-backed. That’s a whole lot of polymer! Our recyclers also picked up a large container of film negatives to recycle. We would have been sad to say farewell if these plates and negatives weren’t going on to a good and resourceful second life. Want to recycle your plates too? Read about our photopolymer recycling program.
Congratulations to Carol Schwartzott of Lilliput Press — our first participant in the Boxcar Press Photopolymer Plate Recycling Program (BPPPPRP). We’re sending Carol an official Boxcar Press printing apron to say thanks. Remember, you can be like Carol and recycle your photopolymer plates too!
We love plastic-backed plates as much as we love rich chocolate pudding or puddle-stomping. But up until this month, after printing a job, we had to throw the plates away in the trash. What else could you do with a stack of processed polymer? And you can guess that polymer took a long time to “disappear†from the landfills. Steel-backed plates weren’t much easier to recycle — you needed a metal recycling company to take the steel, and then you were still stuck with the polymer. We tried to console ourselves with Elvis tunes (Make the world go away. / Yeah, get it off, get it off, get it off my shoulder. / Say the things we used to say / And make the world go away) but, you know, we can’t ignore our planet like we used to. We knew there had to be a better way to dispose of printing plates, even though our polymer manufacturers told us otherwise. So we made a better way.
We’ve just received the Co-op America’s Business Seal of Approval. Hooray! The businesses that are part of this organization are truly cutting-edge green, and we’re proud that our care for the environment and our eco-way of business has allowed us to be a part of this cool organization. We were impressed by the lengthy and thoughtful application process that really inspired us to become more green (for instance — we’re working on developing some kind of screening process for vendors, with the goal of working with companies that have a social & environmental consciousness too). From Co-Op America: “Green businesses operate in ways that solve, rather than cause, both environmental and social problems. These businesses adopt principles, policies, and practices that improve the quality of life for their customers, their employees, communities, and the environment.†Our thoughts exactly.
Earlier this year, Debbie and I were wondering how our company’s benefits could help our local community as well as our employees. It just so happened this conversation took place in our kitchen while I was hungry and Debbie was cookin’ up a homemade meal of organic greens. “Food!” was the only thing I could think of. We laughed and thought, why not have a benefit of organic food? Crazy as it sounded, it made more sense the more we talked about it. We’d be bringing fresh, healthy produce to our employees; helping local farmers who care about their environmental impact; and eating well. Thanks to a very positive reception from our employees (who made this idea happen), we started this program earlier this week. I’ll let Carrie Reagan explain:
It’s hard to forget about global warming when it’s record-breaking heat over here in Syracuse, NY. Heck, it was hard to forget about it when it was (our very mild) winter too. So when our new web site launched, we made a commitment to plant a tree for every platemaking order over $100 for all of 2008. At last tally, we’ve planted more than 350 trees via our friends at American Forests. Way to go!
