Mahatma Mandir in Gandhinagar hosts the World Circular Economy Forum from 15 to 18 September, the tenth edition of the event and the first held anywhere in South Asia. India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and the Central Pollution Control Board are hosting it alongside Sitra, the Finnish innovation fund that started the forum, and the Government of Finland.
The forum’s organisers have split the programme in two. The main sessions on 15 and 16 September run four plenaries, sixteen parallel tracks and an expo of working circular-economy technologies. The 17th and 18th are given over to accelerator sessions run by partner organisations, aimed at people who have to implement this work rather than debate it. In-person seats are by invitation. Anyone can join the online stream for free, which matters for students and small manufacturers in Gujarat who will not be getting an invitation.
Why Gujarat, and why now
Hosting slots for a forum like this get decided on where the material actually flows. Gujarat is India’s densest cluster of the industries a circular economy has to fix: petrochemicals at Dahej and Jamnagar, textiles and dyeing at Surat and Ahmedabad, ship recycling at Alang, chemicals across Vapi and Ankleshwar, and the country’s largest concentration of small and medium engineering units. The state is also where most of India’s plastic waste both begins and gets reprocessed.
Alang is the sharpest example. The yards at Bhavnagar district dismantle a large share of the world’s end-of-life tonnage and feed the steel back into the domestic market, which is textbook circularity. It is also a place where worker safety and hazardous-waste handling have drawn criticism for thirty years. Both facts are true at once, and that tension is roughly what the forum exists to discuss.
The Government of Gujarat appears among the partner organisations, alongside the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Circle Economy, the World Bank, UNDP, UNEP, UNIDO and the Confederation of Indian Industry. The UNDP’s India office lists the same dates and venue.
What this is worth to residents
Conferences at Mahatma Mandir are a familiar sight in Gandhinagar, and residents have learned to be sceptical about what follows them. The honest case for this one is narrower than the press material will suggest.
- Regulatory signals. India’s Extended Producer Responsibility rules for plastics, batteries and e-waste are being tightened, and Gujarat’s processors and recyclers sit at the receiving end. What officials say at this forum is a preview of compliance costs arriving in the next two years.
- Buyer pressure. European customers of Surat’s textile units and Morbi’s ceramics face recycled-content and carbon-border requirements at home. Exporters who understand those rules early keep the orders.
- Local nuisance. Effluent, landfill and stubble burning are lived problems in Vapi, Ankleshwar and rural north Gujarat. Circular processing is one of the few routes that pays for itself.
What to watch
Watch for whether the Gujarat government announces anything with a number attached: a state circular economy policy, a target for industrial waste reuse, or funding for the common effluent treatment plants that already exist and struggle. Announcements without figures are the usual output of these weeks. The forum’s own credibility rests on the accelerator sessions on 17 and 18 September, where the work is meant to be operational rather than declarative, and those sessions will be the fairer test.
Sources: WCEF2026, UNDP India, European Circular Economy Stakeholder Platform
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.