Joinville Zero Waste, DREX Citizen, and Carbon Credits
Joinville Zero Waste, DREX Citizen, and Carbon Credits
A Systemic Proposal for Belonging, Economy, and Ecological Consciousness
In Joinville — a city that breathes industry, mountains, and sea — the future begins with awareness of what we discard, and how we belong. The Joinville Zero Waste Collective has spent years planting the seeds of a new way of living: to reduce, reuse, recycle, and regenerate.
This movement is not just about waste; it’s about reconnecting citizens to their territory, transforming consumption into consciousness and waste into resource.
In the same direction, the DREX Citizen proposal envisions a new social and economic pact: a daily income, created sovereignly without debt or interest, guaranteeing every citizen the existential right to live with dignity. This system allows the State to regulate wealth circulation ethically and transparently.
Just as the Zero Waste Collective sees new life in discarded materials, DREX Citizen sees money as a metabolic energy of belonging — not a product of profit, but a vital flow between people and communities.
This vision expands with Local Carbon Credits, which reward direct care for the biome where one lives. No one should “profit” from distant forests; recognition must come from those who live, plant, compost, and regenerate the soil that sustains them.
In Joinville, this means valuing the people who preserve the Atlantic Forest and those who adopt Zero Waste practices — composting, recycling, conscious consumption, rational use of water and energy. Within the DREX system, each ecological gesture becomes a socially recognized form of value.
A National Project Rooted in Local Belonging
What Joinville Zero Waste teaches Brazil is that collective transformation does not begin in capitals, but in territories of belonging, where people live, breathe, and care for one another.
DREX Citizen and Municipal Carbon Credits provide the political and economic link this movement has been missing — a model of bioeconomic politics, where citizens are not merely consumers but metabolic cooperators of their own city.
Thus, a federal deputy from Joinville could propose:
National Zero Waste Program with Green Citizen Income (NZWP-GCI) — integrating municipal waste management, circular economy initiatives, and DREX Citizen incentives.
Recognition of Community Carbon Credits, tied to local preservation actions and citizen certification of biomes.
National Network of Zero Waste Municipalities — connected through a public transparency platform that records environmental contributions (recycling, composting, urban reforestation, etc.) to generate green microcredits.
Integration of DREX Citizen as a tool for metabolic redistribution, linking daily income to ecological and educational contributions by each citizen.
Toward an Economy of Care
The convergence of DREX Citizen, Carbon Credits, and Joinville Zero Waste signals the birth of a new Economy of Care — a bioeconomic and conscious politics that measures progress not by GDP, but by the quality of relationships between people, ecosystems, and territories.
Money thus returns to its original natural meaning: a flow of energy that sustains life, not one that consumes it.
Joinville can become the first Brazilian territory to demonstrate that Zero Waste, Citizen Income, and Carbon Positivity are not conflicting utopias, but three dimensions of the same civilizational project.
