New Delhi, Sept. 13 -- As the World Circular Economy Forum 2026 takes place in Gandhinagar this month-the first time it is being hosted in India-the temptation will be to measure India's ambition by how closely its policies resemble those already tried in Europe: extended producer responsibility (EPR), eco-design directives, digital product passports.

India should study all of them. Its contribution, however, to global circular-economy thinking will not come from adopting someone else's playbook, but by formalizing, financing and scaling an informal circular economy that is already operating at a big scale.

The stakes are larger than waste. The International Resource Panel estimates that the extraction and processing of materials accoun...