Disposable territories: waste, water, and socio-environmental disasters in Southern Brazil

Abstract

This article examines the socio-environmental disasters in the river basins of the Itajaí-Açu (Santa Catarina) and Guaíba (Rio Grande do Sul), revealing the historical dynamics of inequality, environmental racism, and structural vulnerability. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the study brings together concepts such as urban metabolism, coloniality of power, and disaster capitalism to understand how the unequal management of water and waste reproduces social and racial hierarchies in urban spaces and Indigenous territories. Drawing on empirical data from the 2023 and 2024 floods and case studies such as the Barragem Norte and the peripheral neighborhoods of Porto Alegre, the research demonstrates that these disasters are not exceptional events but part of an ongoing process of precarization that disproportionately exposes poor, Black, and Indigenous communities to greater risks and fewer resources for protection and recovery. By problematizing the production and accumulation of waste in the affected territories, the article proposes to understand residues as material traces of inequality, embedded in a social metabolism that concentrates environmental harm on the bodies and spaces of the most vulnerable. Finally, it discusses how local forms of resistance, such as the mobilizations of the Xokleng people, confront the naturalization of collapse and offer alternative paths of re-existence and environmental justice.