Delta Plastics of the South*

Dhu Thompson makes the challenge of producing and recycling the same product sound simple when he says Delta Plastics of the South basically does two things.
“We make poly-irrigation tubing out of virgin polyethylene, which we buy from chemical companies. Then we sell that product to distributors, who in turn sell it to the grower,” he said.
Delta has identified and located customers’ farms via GPS throughout Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas and Colorado and has “a fleet of trucks that circumnavigate those states” picking up the used product.
“The way it works is, we’re like a huge waste management [crew] that runs on a daily basis, picking up the plastic out of the environment based on GPS locations that growers have provided us,” said Thompson, the company’s president and owner. “We now have over 2,500 GPS locations for farms. That’s pretty significant. That was a big challenge.
“When we convert it to post-consumer resin — that’s the second part of what Delta Plastics does — the resin we make is very clean. In the chemical industry it has continuity; in other words, the properties of the resin are very good and there’s not a lot of variance,” he said. “When you’re manufacturing something, that means a lot. Then we turn around and sell that resin to companies like Glad and Clorox or people in the bag industry.”
Founded in 1993, the company didn’t find stability until Thompson purchased it in 1996. He liked what Delta Plastics, which now has facilities in Little Rock and Stuttgart, was trying to do.
“The initial philosophy made so much sense to be able to produce a product that was beneficial to the agricultural industry … and then to be able to reclaim that product back out of the environment and put it into another purposeful use.”
As part of its commitment to the environment, Thompson said, in the past five years, “we’ve put over $10 million in the recycling side of it,” and “we’re to the point that we recycle over 57 percent of all plastic out of the state of Arkansas.”

Previous Honorees