About
What is Circular Journey?
What it is
Circular Journey studies how countries, cities and communities handle waste and recover resources. Not how they describe what they do in a report, but how the system actually runs: who collects, what it costs, where the material goes, who is paid, and what happens when it does not work.
The method is field research. Someone goes, looks, asks the people running it the same set of questions, records the answers, and publishes them with sources attached. Field work begins in 2027 and runs alongside adaptation work in India from 2028.
The purpose is practical. India is building and rebuilding waste infrastructure at enormous scale right now. A great deal has already been tried elsewhere, and much of what is known about why those attempts succeeded or failed is not written down anywhere useful.
What it is not
It is not a ranking exercise.
There is no league table and no "best country". Systems are shaped by land, income, climate and politics, and comparing them as if they were competing is the fastest way to draw a wrong conclusion.
It is not a consultancy.
The research output is public. Where Circular Journey takes paid work in future, it will be declared on the page it relates to.
It is not a government programme.
It holds no official mandate and no endorsement. See independence, below.
It is not travel content.
The destination is never the point. If a country is on the list it is because a specific question can only be answered there.
How it works
Every country is studied against the same twenty-two point framework, and every mission runs the same eleven stages. That consistency is the whole basis for comparing one place with another.
Independence and funding
Circular Journey is an independent research and knowledge-exchange initiative. It is not a Government of India programme and carries no official endorsement. References to Viksit Bharat 2047 describe a national vision that Circular Journey seeks to contribute to through independent research.
Circular Journey is currently self-funded and unincorporated as a separate entity. As funding arrangements change, they will be stated here, and any research supported by a party with an interest in the outcome will say so on the research itself.
Host organizations are asked for access and time, not money. The journey itself is made by the two co-founders, travelling in person on their own funds, and anyone along the way can offer to host them at home. Where an organization or a household offers help such as local transport or accommodation, that is welcome and it is recorded, but it does not buy a favourable write-up and it is never a condition of being studied.
Evidence standards
Six kinds of statement appear on this site and they are never blended: a sourced fact, a field observation, an attributed opinion, our own analysis, an untested proposal for India, and a stated future goal. Each is labelled where it appears.
A figure without a source does not get published. A case study without its limitations does not get published. Where a number is zero, it is shown as zero.
The programme
- 2026BuildNow
Build the platform and the network
The year with no field research in it. Everything built now exists so that the research, when it starts, can be published quickly, cited properly and compared across countries.
- 2027Explore
First field missions
Southeast Asia first: Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Five countries where the same problems are being solved under very different constraints.
- 2028Adapt
Europe, East Asia, and the India question
Widen the evidence base, then turn to the harder problem: working out honestly what Indian conditions would demand of any model worth importing.
- 2029Convene
A summit in India, proposed
Bring the network together in one place. The point is not the event; it is that by 2029 there should be something worth convening about. Proposed rather than fixed: it depends on the research, the partners and the funding, and the year may move.
- 2030Scale
Extend what held
Pilots that worked are extended; pilots that did not are written up and closed. Both outcomes are published, because a body of evidence that only records successes is not evidence.
- 2035Extend
A standing body of evidence
By the mid-2030s the Atlas should be useful to someone who has never heard of Circular Journey: a practitioner looking up how a system works, and what it costs.
- 2047Contribute
Twenty-one years of public evidence
India marks a centenary year with a stated national vision. Circular Journey is independent of that programme. What it can offer by then is a long, honest record of what was tried, what worked, and what did not.