Here comes Ronald Work, steering his truck into the parking lot behind a Rite Aid drugstore in Ambridge. He pulls up to a pair of dumpsters inside a chain-link fence, unbuckles his seatbelt and lowers himself to the ground. He unlocks the fence, gets back in the truck and buckles up.
Down comes a crossbar from over the truck. A fork with two prongs also lowers, and Mr. Work glides the prongs into the fork pockets on each side of the dumpster. He pushes a button and the dumpster raises, creating a shadow that darkens the cab.
When the dumpster hovers over the back of the truck, it turns over. Boom. Boom. The trash jangles as it lands. After Mr. Work shakes the dumpster around via his control shift, loosening any danglers, he brings it back to the ground.
“Everything you pull into, you have to back away from,” he says, so he backs away as liquid muck drips from the sides and back of the truck. The average garbage truck is 14 feet high, 30 feet long and able to carry up to about 10 tons of waste.
Mr. Work was honored by the National Waste & Recycling Association this month because he’s been very careful moving his big vehicle in and around his routes. The 56-year-old has worked at Waste Management for 28 years, logging 3,809 pickups and 718 miles on his route each week. For almost three decades, Mr. Work has picked up the trash, accident free.
“It kind of felt good,” he says of getting the award. “But I don’t do anything more than everybody else does every day,” he added, turning into a narrow driveway with ease.
Mr. Work was honored with a Driver of the Year Award at a ceremony in Las Vegas, where he was also given a plaque. He’s one of an estimated 136,000 garbage truck drivers nationwide.
2 a.m. to 2 p.m.
By the time he was 12, he began spending summers in a garbage truck, helping his father — a driver — haul trash in Sewickley. He formally became a garbage truck driver at 16, 40 years ago. Back then, “It was easy to get into this business,” he said. “Nobody wanted to be a garbage man.”
He works his frontloader from 2 a.m. to 2 p.m. five days a week, 48 weeks a year. Most days he makes a couple of hundred pickups before dumping his load at a landfill. There he’ll weigh in at a scale, back into a spot and flip a switch to open the tailgate. Out comes the trash.
Then he’ll go back out for a couple of hundred more pickups. He works alone.
Among his stops: That Rite Aid, a Wendy’s and apartment complexes. On this day, a hot Tuesday morning in June, Mr. Work looked back on the career he’s made out of taking care of the trash.
“I didn’t think I’d be working here that long,” he says. “Man, it’s nice … it’s not a bad place to work, not a bad job.
“A job is what you make it. If you want it to be hard, it’s going to be hard.”
To read the full story, visit http://www.post-gazette.com/business/2016/06/30/Waste-Management-driver-Ronald-Work-awarded-for-his-dedication-to-the-job/stories/201606300124.