Boxcar Press subsidized a CSA organic farm subscription for Boxcar employees this year. It was an amazing experience (and really yummy too!), and we loved feeling connected to our community in this very real way. The growing season in CNY finally ended, and so our 20 weeks of organic vegetable delivery came to an end. Carrie, our officer manager who found a way to make our CSA dream work, has these parting thoughts.

“Besides yummy veggies and fruits, what did Boxcar Press take away from our first annual CSA participation? This is the question I asked myself more than once over the past 20 week growing season. Sure, the veggies are good, but was it worth the hard work organizing, maintaining, safeguarding and cooking 20 shares of veggies (well, we each cooked our own shares, but it was still lots more cooking than I’m used to!)? The short answer is a resounding yes!”

“Being involved with the CSA was a direct opportunity for Boxcar Press to become involved in our local environment. It allowed us to use our spending power to support local farms that practice farming techniques which take a stewardship of our land and create hope for a safe planet for our children and their children, too. For some of us, it introduced us to vegetables we had never experienced before and for others it reminded us of the wonders of nature and the bounty our very own upstate New York land can provide. Best of all, it allowed Boxcar Press to enrich the community by providing Syracuse with its first every downtown POD (Point of Delivery), which made veggie pickups convenient enough to attract 13 new CSA members this year! When it is all said and done, bringing goodness to many is what we’re all about. Now go eat your veggies! (P.S. If anyone out there wants to know how to organize something like this, I’d be happy to share)”

We love edge painting (by hand) our letterpress printing! Especially in really bright, vibrant colors. Once you start looking at enough edge painting pieces, paper just looks naked without its edges all gussied up in color. The design and color dreaming of this job comes from Pickett’s Press. Kate @ Pickett’s Press was sweet enough to send one her fabulous ribboned boxes too, so we can see how great a presentation she’s created for the notecards and stationery that we letterpress printed for her.

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!)

Boxcar Press has been supporting American Forests in a variety of ways this year — we’re planting one tree for every platemaking order over $100 in 2008; we match tree donations that our customers make if they purchase trees during checkout on our web site; and we’ve done various promotions for our custom printing, like donating 100% of certain sample purchases to American Forests, or giving printing discounts if our customers donate a certain amount of trees. We just did a year to date tally of our tree donations, and saw that we have planted 4,168 trees through American Forests this year so far! Each new tree planted by American Forests will absorb roughly 740 pounds of carbon dioxide, so doing some fancy-pants multiplication, we found that our trees will absorb roughly 3,084,320 pounds of CO2. Pretty cool stuff! (Photo of tree & forest from a letterpress photo shoot in Buttermilk Falls - Ithaca, NY)

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.

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