The World Circular Economy Forum 2026, the world's leading annual gathering dedicated to advancing circular-economy practices, convened in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, from September 15 to 18, drawing more than 3,600 stakeholders from 62 countries — one of the largest turnouts in the event's history and its first edition hosted in India. The forum was jointly organised by India's Central Pollution Control Board, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Finland's innovation fund Sitra, and the government of Gujarat.
Since its inception in 2017, the World Circular Economy Forum has served as a global convening point for policymakers, business leaders, investors and civil-society representatives working to accelerate the shift away from linear 'take-make-dispose' economic models toward systems built around reuse, resource efficiency and regenerative design. Hosting the 2026 edition in India — and specifically in Gandhinagar — signalled a deliberate effort by organisers to shift the forum's centre of gravity toward the Global South, a region increasingly viewed as central to the future of circular-economy practice rather than a peripheral participant in a conversation historically dominated by European and North American institutions.
Discussions across the four-day event spanned circular finance mechanisms, sustainable resource management, digitalisation's role in enabling circularity, circular supply chains, extended producer responsibility frameworks, green-jobs creation and the development of genuinely sustainable consumer products. Organisers framed the event's core message around a striking economic reality: countries across the Global South, including India, sit on vast reserves of materials the world urgently needs for batteries, electronics, renewable-energy systems and other emerging technologies, yet have historically captured only a fraction of the economic value generated from those resources.
Sitra President Atte Jääskeläinen, addressing the forum, emphasised that the strategic question facing resource-rich developing economies is no longer whether global demand for critical materials will grow — that trajectory is already well established — but rather which countries and companies will succeed in capturing the value created from those materials by moving beyond raw exports toward domestic processing, manufacturing and circular industrial capacity.
India's own domestic circular-economy policy has evolved considerably in recent years, with extended producer responsibility regulations now covering categories including electronic waste, plastics packaging and battery materials — a regulatory framework that has pushed Indian manufacturers to engage more directly with end-of-life material recovery than in previous decades, when such considerations were largely absent from domestic industrial policy. Hosting the World Circular Economy Forum provided Indian policymakers a prominent platform to showcase this evolving regulatory architecture to an international audience of investors and industry leaders.
For India specifically, hosting the forum carries symbolic and strategic weight. The country has increasingly positioned circular-economy principles as central to its broader industrial and environmental policy, particularly around electronics waste, battery recycling for its rapidly scaling electric-vehicle sector, and textile and plastics circularity. Gujarat, as host state, has emerged as one of India's more aggressive adopters of circular-economy industrial policy, making the choice of Gandhinagar as venue a deliberate showcase of the state's ambitions in the space.
The forum's discussions also carried practical implications for India's private sector, with sessions exploring how domestic manufacturers, particularly in electronics, textiles and automotive components, can integrate circular design principles — extending product lifespans, designing for disassembly and material recovery, and building take-back and recycling infrastructure — into operations that have historically prioritised cost minimisation over end-of-life material recovery.
For Gujarat specifically, the state's positioning as forum host built directly on several years of active industrial-policy investment in recycling and material-recovery infrastructure, particularly around textile and plastics recycling clusters that have historically operated informally but have increasingly attracted formal investment as extended producer responsibility rules have tightened enforcement across the sector.
As the World Circular Economy Forum concluded its Gandhinagar edition, organisers and participants alike framed the event less as a one-off gathering than as a marker of a broader structural shift: circular-economy practice is increasingly being defined not from Europe outward, but through the active participation of resource-rich, rapidly industrialising economies across the Global South, with India positioning itself firmly at the centre of that emerging conversation.
