Would you recycle if you knew someone would do it for you?

This is currently a dilemma that faces quite a few people living in Rio de Janeiro. It’s a reality that’s about to change.

There’s always a psychological deterrent to cleaning up your own mess when you’ve got good reason to believe some will do so for you. Few people in Rio bother to separate their recyclables from their trash – they know that in the city’s principal landfill there are hundreds of people that make a living poking through garbage and selling the recyclable material they can salvage.

It’s a degrading lifestyle that compromises human health and calls into question the underpinnings of a society that would allow for it, as is so well summed up in Brazilian photographer Vik Muniz’s fabulous documentary Waste Land. After spending several weeks working on a photography project with a group of these collectors, most of them realize (not surprisingly) that they no longer want to work in a pile of trash.

In Rio, by the start of next year, none will. The Gramacho landfill in Duque de Caxias on the outskirts of Rio will close at the start of 2012. The new facility being developed to replace it will not allow people doing the sort of work Vik Muniz documented.

There are quite obvious human benefits to that decision, which will force people to seek a different and hopefully less denigrating form of work. The downside is obviously the environmental one – people accustomed to have their trash sorted out for them have little incentive to do so themselves. The city is promising to boost what is currently a limited curbside recycling program to reduce the amount of glass, aluminum and cardboard that gets buried in the new landfill. But actually getting people to do it will take some quite a bit of cajoling, especially for people who have gotten used to having an army of trash pickers to take care of it for them.

As Brazil gets wealthier, its sustainability dilemmas start to look more and more like those in the United States …