Association of Plastic Recyclers

The Association of Plastic Recyclers is an international nonprofit, and the only North American organization focused exclusively on improving plastics recycling. More than 300 member companies across the value chain look to APR for the technical standards that decide what is and is not recyclable. Their flagship resource, the APR Design Guide, is the framework the industry runs on.

When APR came to us in 2025, the digital side of the organization was carrying real weight. Four separate website environments. Two different platforms. More than 60 GB of legacy content that had to stay accessible. A custom WordPress taxonomy holding the entire Design Guide, with content originally bulk-loaded by a CSV import script the previous developer had left mostly undocumented. A small staff trying to keep all of it moving while also running an industry association.

What they needed was a nonprofit website partner who would take ownership of the whole environment. Not rebuild it. Not abandon the archives. Just step in, learn the system, and run it.

Here is what the partnership produces a year-plus in:

• A site that stays steady through monthly content updates, twice-a-year publish cycles, and the real operational rhythm of an industry standard.
• A custom Design Guide content workflow that lets editors prepare new guidance directly on the live site, visible only to admins, ready to publish when the window opens.
• A legacy archive environment that keeps decades of historical industry content accessible without slowing the live site down.
• Honest math when scope shifts. When the legacy migration came in six times larger than the original ballpark, we went back with the new numbers and a tiered price that matched the actual storage load.
• A team at APR that does not have to think about the website. That is the whole point.

Taking Over a Custom System and Making it Work

APR’s Design Guide is not a set of static pages. It is a custom WordPress taxonomy built around base resin types like PET Rigid, HDPE, and PP, with guidance cards loaded and updated through a CSV import system that nobody at APR had inherited documentation on. When we took it over, we reverse-engineered how the import actually behaved, rebuilt it as a reusable module-import foundation rather than a one-off script, and shipped two new modules to staging in the same pass.

Then a deeper problem surfaced. APR’s team needed to make content changes monthly but only wanted to publish to the live Design Guide twice a year. A staging-to-live merge on a database this complex was too risky. So we built draft-mode for guidance cards directly on the live site, visible only to logged-in admins, ready to flip public when the publish window opens. The COO approved the scope on the spot. The first draft cards landed on staging in December.

That is the kind of work an ongoing partnership unlocks. The vendor relationship version of this conversation does not happen. You have to know the system to suggest the fix.

What an Ongoing Partnership Actually Looks Like

Over the last year, APR’s team has opened about two tickets per month with us. All Medium priority. No emergencies. The work moves through staging, gets reviewed, goes live, and the next thing comes through. Some weeks bring a DNS change or a Cloudflare audit. Some bring multilingual translation imports for the Chinese version of the Design Guide. Some bring custom development that quietly extends a system that already works.

The cadence is steady because the relationship is. APR’s team sends the work to Brady on our side. Brady scopes it with Jimmy. The team at APR gets the time back to focus on policy advocacy, member work, and the recycling industry itself, which is what they are actually there to do.

This is what a long-term nonprofit website partner is supposed to look like. Adaptable, steady, and built to support a mission bigger than any one project.

→ Looking for a web partner who takes ownership of the system and stays available for the work after launch? Let’s talk about our partnership plans.