How are municipal waste in the slums of Rio de Janeiro? SchuelerAdriana Soares de KzureHumberto RaccaGustavo Badolati 2018 <p></p><p>Abstract Low-income communities situated on slopes or flat sites present serious problems of urban environmental management, including the generation, disposal and collection of municipal solid waste. There was a time when the urban waste was accumulated in these very poor spaces due to lack of public sanitation policies. However, waste production in contemporary cities is the result of the same type of consumption which affects different scales and socioeconomic contexts. Challenges such as high urban density, lack of space for temporary disposal of waste, and difficult access of trucks and collection equipment in slum areas, for example, are persistent. As a matter of fact, despite the regular collection, irregular disposal of garbage is still frequent in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The reflections in this article seek a general contextualization of the waste management situation in nine low-income communities in Jacarepaguá neighborhood between the years of 2014 and 2016. The situation of garbage collection in these urban places, which are marked by informality and illegality, was initially diagnosed and then alternatives to reduce the difficulty to manage of material and to facilitate its collection were developed. In this sense, we introduce a discussion on the actions of the public sphere and urban planning in the development of slum upgrading projects, aimed at improving the quality of life of the residents from a socio-environmental perspective, and their articulation with socio-economic and socio-cultural aspects.</p><p></p>