Plastics recycler gets new leader, eyes expansion

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Nicole Janssen, Denton Plastics

In 1994, Nicole Janssen was working at The Gap, stalled in her quest to advance her career and help the environment.

Sixteen years later, Janssen is assuming the presidency of Portland’s Denton Plastics, the company founded by her father, Dennis Denton, in 1983.

Denton, who grew the company into one of the Northwest’s largest plastics recyclers, will remain as owner and board chairman. The 35-employee company declined to disclose specific sales figures, but said annual revenue falls between $12 million and $30 million.

“We’ve been discussing it for years,” Denton, 63, said of the transition. “It’s a natural for me to transition out, remain as chairman, and have the youth movement take over.”

Yet in the world of family business, having the next generation take over is far from a certainty.

Fewer than half make the transition from first generation to the second, and the numbers get slimmer after that: 12 percent of companies transfer to the third generation and just 3 percent into the fourth, said Robin Klemm, director of the Austin Family Business Program at Oregon State University.

“Succession is not, ‘one day I decide this and then it’s yours,’” Klemm said. “It’s a process we look at as taking five to 15 years and truly, the grooming starts at the kitchen table.”

Janssen has been with Denton Plastics for 16 years, most recently as vice president.

But it was never her goal, not even at age 24, when she was a manager at The Gap’s Portland-area stores with no apparent way up the career ladder.

“I was someone that wanted to keep moving up, but I was definitely passionate about the environment,” she said. “I just never thought about working for my dad.”

A subsequent conversation with her uncle made Janssen realize she could help her career and the environment from within her father’s company.

Plastics recycling, Janssen said, was sustainable before it was in vogue. The basis of the profession is taking a complicated element of the waste stream and making it reusable.

Much like Schnitzer Steel Industries Inc. is to steel, Denton is to plastic: It acquires waste plastic on the market, grinds it down and pushes it through an extruder to make tiny pellets that plastics manufacturers buy to mold into new products.

“This is our plastic gold,” Janssen said, a handful of freshly extruded black pellets running through her fingers.

Part of Janssen’s immediate mission is to promote the company’s agenda as a sustainable resource for regional businesses.

Only a quarter of the plastic acquired by Denton can’t be processed locally and is shipped to overseas markets, a figure Janssen said is far lower than most competitors.

One of the biggest challenges for plastics recyclers is the procurement of waste plastics. It’s particularly challenging in the Western U.S., which isn’t known as a hotbed of injection molders or other plastics-related industries with an abundance of available waste, said Don Loepp, managing editor of Plastics News, a trade publication based in Akron, Ohio.

“The biggest problem for the West Coast people is getting the material, because their first inclination is to sell it to a broker and ship it to China,” Loepp said.

Denton ranked No. 61 in a Plastic News ranking of the top plastics recyclers by volume published last May, with 36 million tons of plastic recycled.

Revenue this year is expected to grow 10 percent, and that’s before accounting for a capacity expansion from a new machine.

The new machine, expected to come online in the third quarter, will be far more energy efficient and produce nearly 50 percent more than the company’s existing machine, which produced a million pounds of recycled plastic pellets per month.

More expansion is on the way, though Janssen is reticent to give a timeline.

Denton, which moved into its 40,000-square-foot headquarters and processing plant in Northeast Portland four years ago, owns two acres of adjacent vacant land. Janssen’s hope is to acquire new technology that would allow the company to process the 25 percent of plastics it sends overseas.

“A vision of mine is to build next door and grow more jobs,” she said.