Bruce Shanks believes your attitude is poured into your work. After 12 years of working mostly on the demanding and repetitive recycling press at Wanaka Wastebusters, he’s in a good position to know.

"When everybody’s miserable, it comes back out in the work, and if everyone’s happy it comes out in the work,” Bruce says.

Bruce has lived in the Wanaka area for more than 20 years (he’s lost track of how long it’s been). He worked at the Mt Iron Sawmill (now closed) and Placemakers before starting at Wastebusters, where he was initially a kerbside runner.

Bruce used to press wool when he was younger (he grew up in Oamaru), and now he’s the main press man out the back of the recycling yard at Wastebusters. It’s not the cushiest workplace. Bruce is pretty much outdoors year round, but he has his strategies for dealing with that.

He reckons the ‘emergency shower’ near the fence is just for him: he had to use it a few times last summer to cool down in the 30+ degree heat. "Sometimes I put my head under the emergency shower. I’m the only one that does.”

Winter’s a different matter. Does it get cold? "Oh, far out. When it’s really cold, I just stop. I can’t work when my forehead and fingertips are freezing.” That’s when Bruce goes into the shop for a while to join shop cat Mr Manly thawing out in front of the fire.

Bruce has noticed how much busier Wastebusters has become over the past 12 years. "More people have come to town, there’s more recycling. We used to do about one bale a week, now we do about one a day,” he said.

While he puts "just about everything you can think of” into the bales he presses, "cardboard is the biggest one for miles”. 

He is responsible for ensuring the correct materials go into the press, and those clean bales are Wastebusters’ pride and joy - it means the recycled material is actually recycled into new products, even when the worldwide recycling industry is in a crisis. Some of Bruce’s bales go to Dunedin, some to Christchurch, then overseas to remade into useful stuff.

Sue Coutts, Bruce Shanks, and Gina Dempster on some of Wastebusters’ clean bales of recycling.

Stopping waste is a concern to Bruce. "There’s just so much waste now. I reckon the biggest waste will be supermarket plastic bags.”

But for all Bruce’s serious approach to getting his job done, his sense of humour can’t be missed.

"Yeah, OK, I am pretty friendly and sociable,” he admits. That’s where his philosophy of being happy at work comes in. "One thing that makes the job is the people. If you say ‘how’s it going’ and you get a not very good response, how would you feel? When I make jokes and say nice things, people like it.”

Bruce’s job at Wastebusters and his church community - he attends Wanaka’s New Life church - are both important parts of his life. He uses tradespeople from his church to work on his house wherever possible, and a Wastebusters colleague describes Bruce as a model employee: he’s never been late to work, and seldom takes sick days. 

Bruce bought his house (with "an extremely good view of the lake”) at Lake Hawea in 2002. He’s pretty house proud: he’s renovated the roof, the shower, painted inside and out, and is now looking forward to getting new curtains and blinds. While he does furnish his place with the occasional Wastebusters find (maybe a DVD and a vase to put with his "lovely plants”), he prefers brand new, and says his house is "getting quite flash”.

"I’m sitting on it - I’ll never move,” Bruce says. He likes the idea of a holiday though - the last time he travelled overseas was in 1988, and sometimes, while operating the Wastebusters press, he dreams of a cruise around the Pacific Islands. "I reckon it would be quite fun, quite cool.” 

But in the meantime, he "doesn’t mind” working away out the back of Wastebusters.

"Everyone’s around me, sorting out and recycling. It’s not a stressful job.”

If he has one complaint, it’s that other people’s music choices at work don’t accord with his taste for 60s music. Maybe the right music enhances the positive attitude Bruce pours into his work, as he keeps the press going, producing more clean Wastebusters bales.

PHOTOS: Simon Williams