Tanya Van Der Water inherited Buckaroo Leatherworks from her late father, along with the values that shaped both their family and the business: integrity, craftsmanship and a belief that nothing of value should be wasted.
But the greatest thing her father left Tanya wasn’t the business.
It was the confidence to take what he built and go further than he ever could.
Now Tanya is putting that inheritance to the test.
She has gambled Buckaroo’s future on an abandoned RSL club in Port Kembla, a vast, decaying building she intends to transform into a new manufacturing base and the foundation of an innovation hub. With just ten weeks to make the site operational, Tanya must navigate construction, money, manufacturing and the expectations of everyone who depends on the business.
If it fails, she risks what her father spent a lifetime building.
If it succeeds, Buckaroo becomes something neither of them could have imagined.
Running through that transformation is another inheritance from her father: the belief that useful things should never simply be thrown away. What begins with the remnants left behind by leather manufacturing grows into Tanya’s ambition to find new value in waste and explore what a more circular Australian manufacturing future might look like.
But The Worth In Waste is not ultimately a film about leather.
It is about a daughter deciding what to preserve, what to risk and what she must change in order to move beyond the generation before her.
Filmed with intimate cinéma vérité access, The Worth In Waste follows that transformation as it happens. No staged moments. No corporate portrait. Just Tanya, her family, the business and the consequences of the choices she makes.
A cinematic feature documentary about inheritance, courage and the things we choose to build from what we have been given.
