Your Rubbish, Our Hope

For decades rubbish pickers crawled their way over the biggest rubbish dump in South America. Their lives in Gramacho, just outside Rio de Janeiro, living alongside their pigs and dogs, amongst the hundreds of thousands of tons of bloody hospital waste, dead bodies, festering food, needles and other sharp objects, were unimaginably hard and poor. But in the lead up to Brazil’s hosting of the World Cup in 2014 Gramacho was closed. So what happened to them and how have they survived in this new world?