About
Why we exist
The problem is not a shortage of ideas
Waste management has been studied for decades. There are good systems operating right now in dozens of countries, and most of the technical problems have been solved somewhere by someone.
What is missing is the connective tissue. A municipal officer in an Indian city deciding how to structure household collection has access to plenty of glossy reports about international best practice, and almost nothing that answers the questions that actually determine whether a scheme survives: what did it cost to run in year three, what did the people already doing this work lose, what happened the first monsoon, and which of its assumptions quietly depended on something that city does not have.
Those answers exist, in the heads of the people who built the systems. They are just not written down. Circular Journey exists to go and write them down.
The scale of the thing
Two pieces of published context, shown here with their sources and their caveats attached, which is how every factual claim on this site is presented.
Global municipal solid waste generation is projected to rise substantially by 2050 on current trajectories, with the sharpest growth in rapidly urbanising economies.
United Nations Environment Programme, Global Waste Management Outlook 2024: Beyond an Age of Waste (2024). SourceProjections are scenario-based. They describe what follows from stated assumptions, not a forecast of what will happen.
The share of material cycled back into the global economy remains a small fraction of total material use, and has not improved over recent editions of the measure.
Circle Economy Foundation, The Circularity Gap Report 2024 (2024). SourceThe headline circularity metric is a single global ratio derived from material flow accounts. It is useful as a direction of travel and poor as a country scorecard.
Both are projections rather than measurements, and both publishers say so. That distinction is exactly the sort of thing that gets lost when a figure is repeated without its source, which is why the source travels with it here.
Why India, specifically
India is building and rebuilding waste infrastructure at a scale and speed that few countries have attempted. Decisions being made now will shape how hundreds of millions of people handle waste for the next thirty years.
It also has something most of the countries usually studied do not: a large, working, informal recovery sector that already performs much of the function a formal system would be built to provide. Any model imported without accounting for that is not an upgrade, it is a transfer of income away from the people currently doing the work.
That combination makes India both the most interesting place to apply this research and the hardest. It is the reason the programme has a twenty-one year horizon rather than a three year one.
What success would look like
Someone uses it to make a decision.
A municipal officer, a cooperative or a company finds a case study, reads the limitations section, and changes what they were about to do.
The failures are on the record.
Pilots that did not work are written up as carefully as the ones that did, so the same mistake costs less the second time.
The people are connected, not just the papers.
A practitioner in Surabaya and one in Patna end up in the same conversation, which is worth more than any report either of them could read.
It outlives the project.
The Atlas remains useful to people who have never heard of Circular Journey.
Related: how this relates to Viksit Bharat 2047.