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While biking through different countries, Saurabh Gupta felt the need for the involvement of citizens in sustainable development against increasing environmental risks. This journey convinced him that we must focus on small solutions, within our reach, to change the world. 

The young Indian founded Earth5R, a platform that helps citizens create a meaningful impact and develop leadership skills through climate action. 

Inspired by the circular economy, the decentralised approach of Earth5R uses local resources to solve local economic issues. Activities are based on individual action like plantation, compost and waste segregation. The goal is to train volunteers to become citizen leaders and to teach their knowledge to their communities. 

A bottom-up approach 

The Earth5 team has found that when local communities are trained by a member of their own community, they respond better. As part of Earth5R's sustainability programs, those living in slums have been trained to collect unusable resources that would otherwise end up in landfills, rivers and oceans, and to design marketable products. These resources are sold in local cities with the help of Earth5R volunteers and team members. 

This proves that a bottom-up approach for the green economy is more sustainable and scalable. 5,300 residential buildings in India have been turned into Zero Waste ones. 750 tons of plastic waste are collected and recycled each month and 600 tons of organic waste are processed by the community-based decentralised management program. 1.5 million families on the bottom of the pyramid have been transformed through the circular economy-based model of Earth5R.   

Earth5R is running programs across 53 countries with the help of 65,000+ citizen volunteers and a network of schools, universities, NGOs, municipalities, and local governments. 

Would you like to know more about this platform?