How Indian businesses are looking to profit from a circular economy

MUMBAI: The circular economy was a buzzword and a checkbox for most corporations for the longest time. With the volatile macroeconomic environment, this attitude has changed. Rising raw material costs, volatile supply chains and rising transportation costs have made it difficult to protect margins, experts said.

Speaking at the Mint Sustainability Summit 2026, executives from packaging, fashion, electronics and infrastructure industries said that while companies are reducing packaging, using industrial waste as raw material and making recyclable products, circularity succeeds only when it creates commercial value.

"The circularity will not work unless there's value or an economy collecting and using the waste," said Thimmaiah Napanda, managing director and chief executive of Alternicq, India's largest plastic packaging producer.

Napanda said India already has examples of successful circular systems. He said that newspapers have been actively recycled for years because old newspapers can be raw material for the new product, creating a steady market for waste paper. This showed the importance of an economy to support collection and processing across segments to ensure recyclability.

He said manufacturers should focus on "design for recyclability" so products can be converted back into the same products after use.

Naresh Tyagi, chief sustainability officer at Aditya Birla Fashion, said Indian households have traditionally embraced practices such as repairing, reusing and passing down garments long before the concept of a circular economy became popular in corporate boardrooms. Those principles are now being applied to manufacturing.

Tyagi said the company substantially reduced the amount of packaging used per shirt. Almost a decade ago, each shirt required 185 grams of packaging material spread across 22 separate items. That has been cut to 62 grams.

"That was kind of throwing money to the landfill," Tyagi said, adding that the company achieved significant savings while eliminating unnecessary plastic.

In the electronics industry, executives said discarded devices represent a growing source of valuable metals that India has yet to fully recover.

India's rapidly expanding electronics market is producing millions of tons of electronic waste each year, said Dr. Sandip Chatterjee, senior adviser at the Sustainable Electronics Recycling International (SERI) and former secretary at the ministry of electronics and information technology.

Much of that waste is processed by the informal sector, where valuable materials are often lost because of inefficient recovery methods which needs to be tackled with importance.

"The informal sector is losing 70% of high-value materials," Chatterjee said.

He said that greater investment in repair and refurbishment could unlock significant value without requiring large capital expenditure. Refurbishment should be encouraged as end of life of a product is much longer than the end of use of an electronic product for most products, he added.

Chatterjee said that greater investment in repair and refurbishment could unlock significant value without requiring large capital expenditure. Smartphones and laptops, he said, often reach the end of their first ownership cycle years before they become technologically obsolete. He said that this should not be the case and refurbishment must be encouraged.

Infrastructure companies are also adopting circular practices as construction activity accelerates across the country.

Industrial byproducts are increasingly becoming mainstream inputs for construction materials, said Anupama Reddy V., vice president and co-group head at Icra Ltd.

"In the highway and real estate sectors, the circular economy is no longer a luxury. It becomes a necessity to manage costs," she said.

She pointed to fly ash from thermal power plants and slag from steel production, both of which are now widely used in cement manufacturing. The exchange allows one industry's waste to become another industry's raw material while reducing disposal costs and lowering dependence on virgin resources.

The discussion showed how companies across sectors are thinking of improving their profitability and efficiency by being environmentally responsible. Experts agree that instead of looking at circularity as a virtuous checkbox, and instead becoming more about improving competitiveness, it will get more active takers.