Do you ever stop to think about the little inventions that make life easier — a coat hanger, an ice tray, a wheelie bin? Idwall Richards did.
When the northern New South Wales business operator first saw a wheelie bin in the early 1980s, it provided the key to his dream of fully automating rubbish collection.
Around the same time, garbage men in Sydney were striking over pay and working conditions.
They were upset their working day would be pushed out to five hours, even though they were being paid for eight.
"The big deal is we run those hours, we push ourselves for those five hours," a disgruntled garbo told the ABC.
"In the heat of the day it gets to you, it's too strenuous."
"We are men, we are not machines."
Those garbage men ought to have been careful about what they wished for.
Idwall Richards and his Tweed-based waste management company Solo Resource Recovery, also known as JJ Richards and Sons, had long been working on automation.
In 1968, Mr Richards designed a garbage truck featuring a hydraulically driven compactor within a frameless garbage hopper.
Mr Richards said the design became crucial as his company started to develop the mechanism to lift and load wheelie bins.
Mr Richards said he was always convinced that side-loading bins was the way of the future.
"The only people manufacturing garbage trucks were stuck with rear-loading and they were never going to be efficient because you had to have at least two men on it and sometimes three," he said.
"We could do the job with one."
Revolutionising an industry
Now aged 92, Mr Richards is proud the company founded by his father in 1932 was able to avoid industrial action as it moved towards automation by deploying its staff to other jobs.
He is also humble about his role in revolutionising an industry.
"We didn't have a monopoly on the design for long, if at all," he said.
"But we weren't thinking about patents, we were thinking about picking up garbage."
His company, Solo Resource Recovery, has now built more than 1,000 front-side lift garbage trucks on-site at its headquarters in Chinderah on the banks of the Tweed River, sending them all over Australia and overseas.
Garbage man of 40 years, Dave Parkes, said he had fond memories of the days of pre-automated hard yakka.
"It was good fun, you got to know the residents," Mr Parkes said.
"When we worked on Christmas Day, they would ask you in for a beer in the morning — which we never took, of course!"
