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.