The closure of Latin America’s largest dump will put some 1,200 people out of work who live by selling the reusable goods they find among the 8,400 tons of trash produced daily by Brazil’s second city.

The city dump with the bucolic name of Gramacho Garden occupies an enormous expanse of fields in the Rio suburb of Duque de Caxias next to Guanabara Bay, an ecologically rich marine site that contrasts with the mountains of garbage dumped every day by scores of trucks on the land bordering it.