Brazil Zero Waste 2040
A national law for the metabolism of materials

First-Person Consciousness — Brain Bee

“Since the egg, I was never trash. Why do my things become trash?”

When I was still just an egg cell, there was no “trash”.
There was only flow: nutrients coming in, residues going out, everything reused by the mother’s body, by the environment, by biology.

My body learned this way:
metabolism is cycle, not discard.

Later, as a child, I discovered “trash” as a simple gesture:
throwing something away.

• Away from home.
  
  

• Away from my room.
  
  

• Away from my sight.
  
  

But in my Damasian Mind, “away” does not exist.
What leaves me goes somewhere inside my APUS — the body-territory that sustains me. The bag that leaves my door becomes a hill, a ditch, a landfill, smoke, microplastic, an open dump, badly paid work, or a flood in someone else’s house.

As a teenager, the system had already trained me in the linear logic:

I buy → I use a bit → I throw away → I buy again.

My Tensional Selves (Eus tensionais) were shaped to feel pleasure in the new and indifference toward discarding. Social networks, with their attention-engineering, deepened this: an infinite feed of “new things” with packaging, unboxing, disposables, promotions.

The Zone 3 of unlimited consumption became normality.
But from the point of view of Human Quorum Sensing (Quorum Sensing Humano), this is collapse:
a social body that feeds on finite resources and expels waste as if it were not part of itself.

Today, when I look at Brazil, I see a country that already has:

• a National Solid Waste Policy (PNRS – Law 12.305/2010), with a hierarchy of non-generation, reduction, reuse, recycling, treatment and final disposal;
  
  

• updated regulation through decrees on reverse logistics, recycling credits and waste imports;
  
  

• advances in reverse-logistics credit systems and new rules that prioritise waste pickers and the circular economy.
  
  

And yet we are still far from a truly circular metabolism of materials: most Brazilian cities still do not meet PNRS goals, and the burden falls mainly on small municipalities and on waste pickers.

That is why I propose thinking of Brazil Zero Waste 2040 as something much bigger than a waste-management plan:

A national law for the metabolism of materials,
in which the JIWASA State starts seeing the country as a living organism,
and not as a trash factory.

1. From “waste” to metabolism: what does “Zero Waste 2040” mean?

In circular-economy approaches, “zero waste” is not magic.
It is life-cycle redesign so that materials remain in use as long as possible, in closed loops, without relying on landfills or incineration.

In the language of complex systems and urban metabolism, this means:

• mapping inflows (materials, energy, water);
  
  

• tracking transformations (production, consumption, use);
  
  

• redesigning outflows (reuse, recycling, recovery, composting) so they stop being “end of the line” and become the “input of another process”.
  
  

Post-2020 research on Urban Metabolism and Material Flow Analysis (MFA) shows that:

• we can identify leverage points where small changes in certain streams (organics, packaging, electronics) lead to systemic shifts;
  
  

• small municipalities can use MFA to design more efficient waste policies adapted to local realities;
  
  

• linking circular economy and urban metabolism is now one of the most promising fields for planning sustainable cities.
  
  

What is missing is turning this knowledge into a State law, with clear targets, economic instruments and metabolic income for citizens.

2. Where we are: PNRS advances and limits

The PNRS, approved in 2010, was a landmark. But only recently did it gain more muscle through:

• updated decrees consolidating rules and detailing instruments of the national policy;
  
  

• the creation of official reverse-logistics credits, making it possible to finance and value recycling;
  
  

• new rules on reverse logistics, plastic packaging and waste imports, with emphasis on protecting the environment and strengthening waste pickers’ cooperatives.
  
  

At the same time, recent diagnoses reveal:

• weak local implementation: many municipalities still lack waste-management plans compatible with PNRS;
  
  

• poor integration with circular economy: official documents still treat “waste” as a sector, not as a national metabolism of materials.
  
  

So we have a legal base, but still lack a Zero-Waste country project.

3. What would the “Brazil Zero Waste 2040” Law look like?

In my proposal, Brazil Zero Waste 2040 is a national law for the metabolism of materials, resting on four pillars:

3.1. Metabolism as the basis of policy

The law would establish that:

• waste planning becomes material-flow planning;
  
  

• Urban Metabolism and MFA tools are mandatory for national, state and municipal waste plans;
  
  

• the federal government must offer standard methods and digital platforms, so that even small municipalities can run strong diagnostic studies without prohibitive cost.
  
  

This turns Brazil into a mapped organism: we know where materials enter, circulate and exit — and we can adjust this metabolism as we adjust a diet.

3.2. Zero-waste targets by material type

By 2040, the law could set phased targets for:

• eliminating landfilling of recyclable dry waste (paper, plastics, glass, metals) and urban organic waste, with different regional timelines;
  
  

• drastically reducing hazardous wastes and rejects, with focus on e-waste, batteries and construction waste;
  
  

• progressive bans on non-recyclable products and single-use packaging, aligned with global trends and with the future international plastics treaty.
  
  

More than a list of prohibitions, the law would create a transition roadmap:
year by year, sector by sector, with shared but differentiated responsibility among industry, commerce, public authorities and citizens.

3.3. JIWASA State and citizen-cell: material-based metabolic income

Next step: connect materials and income.

• Entire value chains based on primary resources (ore, oil, biomass) would have targets for substitution by recycled materials.
  
  

• Part of the wealth generated by this substitution (energy savings, reduced imports of raw materials, lower environmental impact) would feed a National Materials Metabolism Fund.
  
  

• This fund would be used to:
  
  

• finance Zero-Waste infrastructure (reuse centres, waste-picker cooperatives, composting plants, repair and remanufacturing hubs);
  
  

• pay Drex Citizen as material-based metabolic income, distributed daily, prioritising vulnerable territories and recycling workers.
  
  

In this design, I, as a citizen, stop being only a “waste generator” and become a cell in a metabolism that returns to me part of the value I help create.

3.4. Waste pickers as the nervous system of metabolism

Recent research on reverse logistics, recycling credits and extended producer responsibility (EPR) clearly shows that policies only work when waste pickers are structurally integrated, not just used as cheap labour.

The Brazil Zero Waste 2040 Law could:

• recognise waste-picker cooperatives as essential State infrastructure;
  
  

• guarantee stable public contracts and their participation in reverse-logistics governance;
  
  

• reserve minimum shares of recycling credits for direct remuneration of waste pickers.
  
  

In this design, waste pickers stop being the “last line of exclusion” and become neurons in the material metabolism of the JIWASA State.

4. The 1988 Constitution as DNA of Brazil Zero Waste 2040

Several articles of the Constitution already support such a law:

• Article 225 – guarantees the right to an ecologically balanced environment, essential to a healthy quality of life, and imposes on public authorities and the community the duty to defend and preserve it for present and future generations.
  
  

• Article 170, VI – includes environmental protection as a principle of the economic order, pointing towards an economically and metabolically responsible development.
  
  

• Article 182 – creates the urban-development policy, to be implemented by municipalities, ensuring the well-being of their inhabitants.
  
  

In my reading, Brazil Zero Waste 2040 would be:

• the metabolic translation of Article 225 – by mapping and adjusting material flows;
  
  

• the concrete application of Article 170, VI – making circular economy a structural criterion of production;
  
  

• the material arm of Article 182 – reorganising cities as organisms instead of discard machines.
  
  

5. Future Memory: who is Brazil in 2040?

If I do a Future Memory exercise, I see myself in 2040 like this:

• I wake up in a city where almost nothing is “thrown away”;
  
  

• my neighbourhood has reuse, repair, exchange and recycling hubs that are part of daily life, not occasional campaigns;
  
  

• I open my Drex Citizen app and see, every day, the metabolic income coming from carbon (Blog 8) and from materials (Blog 9);
  
  

• national statistics no longer speak of “tons of waste”, but of material flows in cycles.
  
  

Above all, my consciousness has changed:

I no longer perceive myself as an isolated individual
drowned in packaging and disposables,
but as a cell of a JIWASA State,
capable of adjusting its own metabolism.

When I frame Brazil Zero Waste 2040 as a national law for the metabolism of materials, I am not merely writing a waste-policy document.

I am proposing a new way of existing:

• where the Damasian Mind recognises that every act of consumption is a political gesture;
  
  

• where Human Quorum Sensing reconnects individuals, cities and biomes into a single skin;
  
  

• where “waste” finally returns to what it always was, back in the egg:
  
  

just misread information from a cycle we still haven’t learned to close.

Post-2020 References

(Brazil Zero Waste 2040, material metabolism and circular economy)

1. Lino, F. A. M. et al. (2023). Municipal solid waste treatment in Brazil: A comprehensive review.
   
   

2. Galavote, T. et al. (2025). Municipal solid waste management instruments that support the circular economy in Brazil.
   
   

3. Kuhn, E. A. et al. (2024). Urban metabolism and waste flows in small municipalities: Methodological advances in material flow analysis.
   
   

4. Hatley, G. A. et al. (2024). Identifying leverage points using material flow analysis to circularise resources from urban wastewater and organic waste.
   
   

5. Acevedo-De-los-Ríos, A. et al. (2024). Analysis of urban metabolism in an informal settlement.
   
   

6. Ospina-Mateus, H. et al. (2023). Analysis of circular-economy research in Latin America.
   
   

7. Abujder Ochoa, W. A. (2025). Interlinking urban sustainability, circular economy and urban metabolism.
   
   

8. Yang, M. et al. (2023). Circular-economy strategies for combating climate change – A review of zero-waste approaches.
   
   

9. Ferronato, N. et al. (2024). A review of plastic-waste circular actions in seven cities.
   
   

10. Cristiano, S. (2020). On the systemic features of urban systems: A look at urban metabolism and circularity.
    
    

11. Brazil. Law 12.305/2010. National Solid Waste Policy (PNRS).
    
    

12. Brazil. Decrees 10.936/2022, 11.413/2023, 12.451/2025 and 12.688/2025. Regulation of PNRS, reverse-logistics credits and waste imports.
    
    

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