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For decades rubbish pickers crawled their way over the biggest rubbish dump in South America, the lowest of the low, the bottom of the heap. Their lives in Gramacho just outside Rio de Janeiro, living alongside their pigs and dogs, were unimaginably hard and poor amongst the hundreds of thousands of tons of bloody hospital waste, dead bodies, festering food, needles and other sharp objects. Injuries happened all the time and the only people they had to help them were their fellow rubbish pickers, or Catadores as they are called in Brazil.

But in the lead up to Brazil’s hosting of the World Cup in 2014 Gramacho was closed. New cleaner rubbish disposal policies and landfill techniques were introduced and the rubbish pickers were removed from the dump and banned from working on the new one.

So what happened to them and how have they survived in this new world? The Catadores are well known in Brazil – they have formed a union which has campaigned for their rights with some success and managed to negotiate compensation for their loss of work. This included the building of a recycling plant next to the old dump which they could manage and work in themselves.
But that was only for a lucky few – and the memories of the old life are not all bad. Some got rich, found gold and suitcases of money, and what they remember most is the camaraderie. They may only have had each other to turn to – but they had each other. Now they are scattered and lost and the few trying to make the recycling plant work are struggling.

(Photo: A 'catador' (scavenger) goes through bags with bottles at the Jardim Gramacho landfill, in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Christophe Simon/AFP/GettyImages)