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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