Dart Container Corp. will recycle nearly every type of polystyrene foam brought to it — but a recent shipment from 20th Century Fox marks the first time the company has accepted foam from a movie studio.

“We want to get the word out that foam is recyclable,” said Michael Westerfield, corporate director of recycling programs at Dart. ”A lot of foam is used each year, and we’re guessing it is mostly disposed of. We want to raise awareness that it can be recycled, and it has value.”

Movie studios often build sets out of large blocks of foam, shaving and shaping the materials until they meet specification. On the set of the “X-men: First Class” film in Brunswick, Ga., the scrap foam was collected and sent to two Dart foam recycling facilities in Georgia and Florida.

The company received more than 7,500 pounds of foam from the X-men set.

“Seventy-five hundred pounds may not sound like a lot, but when you’re talking about foam, we’re talking about 7.5 semi loads,” Westerfield said.

The foam was densified, ground into beads and recycled. Some of the material was sold to Dart’s downstream clients, where it is made into picture frames, crown moldings and other products, and other material was reused to develop additional sets for the film.

Cheryl Schmidt, corporate administrative specialist of Dart’s Government Affairs and the Environment Department, said the company often gets material from industrial applications, including packaging from General Motors plants in Detroit. Recently, workers used foam ice chests to transport threatened sea turtles out of the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Those chests, after they’d delivered their living cargo, were also sent on to Dart for recycling.

In addition to packaging foam, the company recycles clean food-service foam. Dart has set up a series of food service foam collection points across the United States, mostly near its 13 foam recycling plants. The company has also set up at least one foam recycling program with a school, Westerfield said.

A teacher in Westwood Elementary in Stockton, Calif., and her students devised a way to collect foam lunch trays from students so the foam trays could be recycled.

Student government representatives man a condiment table in the cafeteria and limit the amount of condiments students receive on their trays. Then, at the end of lunch, they oversee sorting at the trash bins. Students empty their trays into trash bins and use their napkins to wipe them off. A member of student government decides if the tray is clean enough for recycling or if it must be sent to the trash.

“We’ll accept anything that’s No. 6 foam,” Westerfield said, “except packaging peanuts. They are better reused rather than recycled.”

Dart Container Corp. manufactures foam food service products and recycles foam. The company is headquartered in Mason, Mich. For more information, visit www.dart.biz/recycle.