At the center of the analysis and regulation of Chile's environmental controversies there is the figure of a subject that publicly demands a resolution for incidents of pollution. Such a model has caused the invisibility of environmental inaction, or the situation of communities affected by long-lasting pollution that do not make any public demands about it. In this paper, such situations are seen as exerting a slow violence which ends by transforming the people experiencing it into waste subjects, with a particular way of being in which physical intimacy with toxic entities occupies a central place. This intimacy makes it very difficult for such subjects to carry out traditional forms of political mobilization. Instead, waste subjects tend to enact strategies to cope with this situation based on uncertainty, frustration and care practices. These arguments are going to be developed from an ethnographic analysis of a rural community in Atacama (Chile) located beside a highly toxic abandoned tailings compound.