Co-Founder
Prashant Gautam
An advocate, working on the part of the circular economy that is about people — the rights, recognition and livelihoods of those who already collect, sort and recover material.
- Based in
- Bihar, India
- Practice
- Law, rights and inclusion
- Contact
- [email protected]
- Profile
Background
Prashant Gautam practises as an advocate. Alongside the ventures, he has supported waste collectors and others in understanding and pursuing their rights — bringing legal awareness and access to justice to people who frequently sit outside formal systems altogether, and who are rarely the ones consulted when those systems are redesigned around them.
That work shapes what he argues for inside Circular Journey. A circular economy is usually presented as a question of materials and technology: better sorting, better processing, better recovery rates. It is also a question of law. Who holds the right to collect? Who is recognised as a worker? Who is accountable when a system fails, and what recourse does anyone have?
He also holds the research to the test that decides whether any of it lasts. A system that works only while somebody is funding it has not been proven, and telling that apart from one that has is most of the value in studying it at all.
The two concerns meet in the same place. Any proposal that improves measurement while removing somebody’s income is not an improvement, however good the recovery rate looks.
A sustainable future has to be an inclusive one. Environmental progress cannot be separated from the people who collect, sort and recover materials every day.
What I work on
Law, rights and inclusion
The part of the problem that is about people
Practising as an advocate, and carrying that into the research: legal awareness and access to justice for waste collectors, and the questions of recognition, entitlement and accountability that a purely technical account of a waste system leaves out. It is the reason the research framework treats the informal sector as the incumbent system rather than as a problem to be tidied away.
Education
Both founders hold the same three qualifications. None of them is in waste management — what they give is a way of looking at it.
- Accounts (Honours)Graduate degree
- Whether a system can pay for itself. Cost, margin and who actually carries them is how a case study gets past the launch photographs to the question that decides everything: is this still running in five years, and on whose money? A model that works only while it is subsidised is a pilot, not a solution.
- SociologyMaster of Arts
- Waste is usually discussed as a materials problem and measured in tonnes. Sociology asks what the tonnage hides: who handles the material, how society regards them, why the work carries stigma, and who captures the value recovered from what other people discard.
- LawLLB
- A circular economy needs more than recycling infrastructure. Who holds the right to collect? Who is recognised as a worker? Who is accountable when a system fails, and what recourse does anyone have? Law is where those questions get answered, or ignored.
Stated as a perspective rather than as expertise. A degree in a subject is not a professional qualification in the work it is applied to, and this page does not present it as one.
Ventures
RecyclingBazar
2017 · OperatingA waste management and resource-recovery venture working on organised collection of recyclable material from institutions, businesses and other bulk generators, and moving it to recyclers who can process it.
www.recyclingbazar.comGardeningBazar
OperatingAn online platform for gardening products and supplies, aimed at making it easier for households and communities to grow and maintain green space.
www.gardeningbazar.com
Recognition
- 2026Certificate of AppreciationDistrict Administration, Buxar · Awarded for the business
- 2020Startup BiharGovernment of Bihar · Recognised startup
- 2019Startup JharkhandGovernment of Jharkhand · Recognised startup
- 2017Startup IndiaGovernment of India · Recognised startup
Get in touch
Email reaches both founders directly, and anything sent to it is read. If you run a system worth studying, know someone who does, or think something on this site is wrong, that is the fastest route.