Introduction: Why follow an object?

During the height of migration through Necoclí, objects moved with people.

Water bottles, backpacks, rain ponchos, plastic bags made of so-called envoplast filled with documents, phones sealed against sea water, and dry clothes: These items are not incidental to migration. They are infrastructures of survival. Designed to be portable, lightweight, and disposable, they accompany people across borders and, more often than not, remain behind.

This piece follows a single object: a five-liter plastic water bottle, locally called garrafón. We photographed it as it moved from the port and beaches of Necoclí, onto a boat crossing the Gulf of Urabá, and finally to Acandí, where it appears again among trash, floating in the water, or lodged between rocks and driftwood along the shore.

Between 2021 and 2024, Necoclí became one of the principal departure points for migrants attempting to cross the Gulf of Urabá toward the Darién Gap and continue northward through Central America. While large-scale northward crossings have stopped since the tightening of border regimes in early 2025, mobility through the region has not ceased entirely. Instead, it has shifted into smaller, more fragmented movements, including return migration. The material residues of the earlier peak period, however, continue to shape coastal landscapes, infrastructures, and everyday life.

The intention of this piece is not to anthropomorphize plastic, nor to replace migrant stories with objects. Rather, by tracing the itinerary of a bottle, we examine how humanitarian design, as a set of practices that produces, distributes, and circulates life-sustaining but disposable objects under conditions of crisis, is implicated in the making of mobile infrastructures of survival; how mobility and environmental degradation are deeply entangled; and how borders function as sites where both people and matter accumulate, stall, and are discarded.

What follows is not a polished photo essay, but a material itinerary: a way of thinking through movement, care, and abandonment.

1.
Provisioning: Preparing for the crossing

Before departure, water was one of the first, and often last, necessities acquired.

In Necoclí, large bottles (garrafones) are sold near the port, alongside food, tents, phone covers, ponchos, and last-minute supplies. For many migrants preparing to cross the Gulf of Urabá toward Acandí, Capurganá and beyond, water is both essential and heavy. A five-liter bottle is a compromise: enough to survive the crossing to the next border town, but light enough to carry.

The bottle is rarely an individual possession. It circulates within small groups, redistributed according to exhaustion, strength, and necessity. As one Venezuelan migrant explained:

“A veces éramos un grupo y nos turnamos en llevar el envase […] nos compartíamos el agua y entonces el peso para caminar del envase nos los compartíamos entre todos” (“Sometimes we moved as a group and took turns carrying the container […] we shared the water and also shared the weight of carrying it while walking”; interview with Venezuelan return migrant, Necoclí, May 2026).

The bottle thus becomes more than a container. It operates as a shared infrastructure of care: It is a transient arrangement that enables survival through circulation, redistribution, and collective handling under conditions of movement. It is passed from hand to hand, rationed collectively, and carried through the landscape together.

This way, the bottle is a humanitarian object par excellence. It embodies care: hydration, life, endurance, yet it is also designed to be temporary. Its purpose is fulfilled quickly. Once emptied, it becomes a burden.

This framing holds a productive tension: while humanitarian design celebrates efficiency, portability, and disposability, these same qualities of a bottle also make it infrastructural in practice. Its usefulness depends precisely on its ability to circulate and be shared under conditions of uncertainty—qualities that are typically associated with infrastructures rather than disposable objects.

Necoclí is not only a point of departure for migrants; it is also a provisioning hub where global supply chains meet mobility. Plastic flows into the town to support movement, even as the town itself struggles with waste management and environmental strain.

2.
The crossing: Shared infrastructures of mobility

On the boat, the bottle is pressed between legs, backpacks, and life vests. It occupies the same narrow space as bodies, subject to the same salty sea spray, sun, and instability. For the duration of the crossing, its fate is aligned with those on board. It is indispensable, but silent.

Movement through the Darién is structured around speed, exhaustion, and improvisation. The bottle moves at the pace of the group carrying it:

“Siempre caminar muy rápido, muy, muy rápido.” (“Always moving fast, very, very fast”; interview with Venezuelan return migrant, Necoclí, May 2026).

Plastic thrives in this context. It is cheap, flexible, and resilient. Human bodies, by contrast, are vulnerable. The asymmetry matters. The bottle will survive the crossing regardless of policy, weather, or exhaustion. People may not.

Yet humanitarian responses often focus on providing objects rather than transforming the conditions that make such crossings necessary. Water bottles, food packets, and temporary shelters become substitutes for political solutions, while their material afterlives remain largely unaddressed.

3.
Arrival: Where mobility slows down

In Acandí, movement rarely ends; it pauses, stalls. For migrants, Acandí is a threshold. For objects, it is often a final destination. Bottles are left on the beach, discarded near informal camps, or carried a little further before being abandoned. Some float back into the sea. The bottle we followed appears again here, no longer held or guarded. It rests among other plastic remnants: containers, bags, fragments of packaging whose origins are difficult to trace but whose accumulation is unmistakable.

As the journey progresses, mobility requires continual shedding. Objects once considered essential become obstacles:

“Uno va botando prácticamente todo, todo el plástico, todo, todo, todo.” (“You end up throwing away practically everything, all the plastic, everything, everything, everything”; interview with Venezuelan return migrant, Necoclí, May 2026).

Abandonment here is not carelessness, but a condition produced by survival.

Borders are accumulation zones. They concentrate people waiting for onward passage, but also materials that no longer have a place. In this sense, Acandí functions as a repository for the afterlives of humanitarian design.

What was once a life-sustaining object now becomes waste, yet it does not disappear. Plastic’s durability ensures that it remains present long after the crossing is completed, long after humanitarian actors have moved on.

4.
Parallel lives, unequal endurance

It is tempting to say that plastic and migrants share similar trajectories: both move, both are unwanted, both are managed and contained. But the comparison has limits, and those limits are important.

Migrants are not disposable. Plastic is designed to be.

Yet border regimes often treat people as if they were. Temporary shelters, temporary permits, temporary aid. They all suggest a logic of short-term containment rather than long-term responsibility. The disposable design of humanitarian objects mirrors this logic.

Plastic reveals what humanitarian systems prefer not to see: that care is often imagined as immediate and finite, while its consequences are long-lasting and unevenly distributed. This unevenness is not abstract: it is spatial and social. It falls disproportionately on border communities such as Necoclí and Acandí, where waste accumulates, livelihoods depend on fragile coastal ecologies, and the infrastructures of disposal are insufficient or absent. The bottle’s endurance exposes the temporal mismatch between intervention and aftermath. As Didier Fassin (2017, 5) writes, endurance simultaneously refers to “undergo[ing] ordeals,” “bear[ing] them with patience,” and “continu[ing] to exist beyond them.” Plastic literalizes this temporal persistence. Humanitarian attention moves on; material residues remain. In border ecologies like Necoclí and Acandí, this mismatch becomes visible. Humanitarian presence is intermittent. Plastic remains.

5.
The afterlives of humanitarian design

Humanitarian intervention is rarely designed with afterlives in mind. Even when exit strategies exist, they tend to address institutional withdrawal rather than material persistence.

Once the emergency passes or attention shifts elsewhere, objects remain. Bottles, tents, tarps, latrines, packaging: all continue to shape local environments and economies. In coastal border zones, much of this material ends up in the water, contributing to marine pollution that disproportionately affects communities already living at the margins.

Plastic accumulates through practices of humanitarian provision, circulation, and abandonment, and in this accumulation becomes an archive of intervention and humanitarian design. Each discarded bottle marks a moment of care that was necessary but often insufficient. As Anand Pandian (2016) observes in his reflections on plastic debris, such materials often exceed the human purposes for which they were designed, persisting across landscapes and forms of life. This accumulation raises uncomfortable questions for humanitarian design: Who is responsible for the material residue of care? How long does responsibility last? And what would it mean to design not only for delivery, but also for return, reuse, or disappearance?

Sustainability is often discussed in humanitarian contexts as a technical problem: biodegradable materials, recycling schemes, alternative packaging. These are important matters, yet they do not address the deeper issue: that humanitarian aid often operates within political systems that normalize disposability, both of objects and of lives. This normalization is not only discursive but operational: it shapes what is funded, what is counted as success, and what is allowed to remain unresolved once an intervention is formally concluded.

6.
Rethinking care at the border

Following a bottle forces us to confront an expanded notion of care. Care does not end when water is consumed. It does not end when the crossing is completed. And it does not end when humanitarian actors withdraw. Care continues. It continues in the form of environmental responsibility, infrastructural maintenance, and political accountability.

If the future of humanitarian design is to be meaningful, it must grapple with these extended temporalities. It must ask not only how to save lives in the moment, but how to avoid leaving behind landscapes of abandonment.

The bottle we followed will likely drift and resurface elsewhere, long after photographs fade and policies change. Its journey reminds us that mobility is never just human, and that borders shape ecologies as much as they shape lives.

This piece offers a way of seeing: a slow, material perspective on humanitarian care and its residues. By attending to what is left behind, we can begin to ask harder questions about responsibility, design, and the futures we are collectively producing.

Perhaps the future of humanitarian design depends less on inventing new objects than on learning how to take responsibility for the ones already drifting.

References

Fassin, Didier. 2017. “The Endurance of Critique.” Anthropological Theory 17(1): 4–29.

Pandian, Anand. 2016. “Plastic.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, January 21. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/plastic.