by Sri Varshith Kumar Reddy E
Circularity has moved from an environmental aspiration to an economic strategy. The world is rebuilding its industrial logic. India is recalibrating. In Jammu and Kashmir, a mountain economy rooted in craft, ecology, and regeneration may already hold the blueprint.
The global economy consumed 106 billion tonnes of materials in a single year, and only 6.9 per cent of that came from recycled sources, down from 9.1 per cent in 2018. Since then, 500 gigatonnes have been extracted and largely discarded, representing 28 per cent of everything humanity has consumed since 1900, compressed into just five years. Resource extraction, tripled since 1970, now accounts for 90 per cent of biodiversity loss and 55 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The circular economy was long treated as an environmental correction, discussed in the same breath as carbon offsets and green certifications. That framing has quietly collapsed. At Davos in January 2026, what converged was a recognition that circularity is economically necessary, and the commercial logic behind that is far more durable than any moral argument ever was. Supply chain volatility, commodity price shocks, and geopolitical contestation over critical minerals have transformed resource security into a strategic imperative. The ILO estimates 7 to 8 million jobs could be generated globally through the circular transition. A full structural shift could unlock $4.5 trillion in economic benefits by 2030. These are macroeconomic arguments, and they carry considerably more institutional weight than environmental ones.
From Linear to Layered
The linear economy’s logic is disarmingly simple: extract, manufacture, sell, discard. For much of industrial history, this worked because inputs were cheap, externalities were unpriced, and the planet’s absorption capacity seemed inexhaustible. What changed was the cumulative pressure of scale.
Early circular thinking, embedded in European industrial policy through the 2010s, focused on closing material loops primarily through recycling. The problem was that it addressed outputs rather than inputs. Recycling volumes increased by 200 million tonnes between 2018 and 2021, and the global circularity rate still fell, because overall material consumption grew far faster. Recycling turned out to be symptom management dressed as systems thinking.
The shift now underway moves toward value retention, product longevity, repair, and redesign. Durability and reparability have become competitive manufacturing keywords, and this reframing has moved the conversation from waste management departments to boardrooms, where the leverage has always resided.
The Regulatory Architecture
The circular economy market was valued at approximately $517.79 billion in 2025, projected to reach $888 billion by 2030 at over 11 per cent annual growth. The EU’s forthcoming Circular Economy Act, expected in Q4 2026, will enable free movement of circular products and secondary raw materials across member state borders. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive mandates disclosure of resource use, material efficiency ratios, and product durability strategies, accompanying compliance obligations with direct market access consequences. China’s 15th Five-Year Plan positions resource efficiency as central to industrial competitiveness.
The tension worth examining is the distance between regulatory ambition and operational readiness. Businesses preparing for CSRD compliance are mapping supply chains never previously been examined for material flows. That gap generates risk for the unprepared and meaningful opportunity for firms willing to move ahead of the compliance curve. What emerges is a contested, uneven restructuring whose full consequences will take a decade to materialise.
India: Inherently Circular, Formally Incomplete
India presents an enigma in the global circular economy narrative. The country’s informal recycling sector, consisting of kabadiwallas, scrap dealers, repair artisans, and waste pickers, constitutes a decentralised circularity infrastructure that most industrialised nations have spent decades trying to build by design. The culture of repair, the aversion to waste embedded in household practice, and the reuse of packaging across income levels are functional systems that have been operating without a single policy document to validate them.
NITI Aayog’s Circular Economy Cell, established in 2022, has produced formal roadmaps across seven of eleven target industries. The net-zero 2070 strategy embeds circularity into industrial transition planning, with steel scrap utilisation targeted to rise from 22 per cent to 40 per cent by 2070. The government has already recovered over Rs 4,000 crore from scrap and e-waste monetisation through the Swachhata campaign, a tangible demonstration of the fiscal value embedded in material recovery.
The execution gap persists. The informal recycling economy processes enormous volumes without traceability, worker protections, or the quality assurance that would allow recovered materials to enter formal industrial supply chains. Municipal solid waste infrastructure in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities is chronically underfunded. The institutional coordination required to bridge the formal-informal divide involves millions of workers whose livelihoods must be upgraded rather than displaced in the name of formalising them.
J&K: The Mountain Economy’s Circular Logic
If India’s challenge is scaling and formalising what already exists informally, Jammu and Kashmir offers something categorically different, a region whose ecological constraints, traditional economy, and localised resource systems make it a natural site for circular models that grow from the territory’s own internal logic.
J&K’s economic base rests on agriculture, horticulture, handicrafts, handlooms, forestry, and tourism, all sectors materially embedded in place. The Kashmir Valley’s apple orchards, saffron fields, and walnut groves are components of an ecological economy whose productivity depends entirely on the health of watersheds, soils, and forest cover. Circularity here is primarily about regenerative resource management and value addition along localised supply chains rather than recycling tonnages.
The Dal Lake Weed Processing Unit, showcased at the 12th Regional 3R and Circular Economy Forum in Asia-Pacific in March 2025, captures this potential in a single project. Invasive aquatic weeds degrading the lake’s ecology are converted into organic manure and biogas, simultaneously addressing an ecological problem, generating a marketable product, and reducing methane emissions from decomposing biomass. Srinagar Smart City Limited’s commitment to a zero-landfill status by 2030 under the CITIIS 2.0 program adds institutional weight to what could otherwise remain isolated interventions.
The handicraft sector carries its own circular logic. With 4.22 lakh artisans employed, the second-largest employer in J&K after agriculture, with women constituting nearly 45 per cent of the workforce, handicrafts function simultaneously as a livelihood system, a cultural preservation mechanism, and a circular production model. Pashmina, hand-knotted carpets, papier-mâché, and walnut wood carving involve natural, locally sourced materials processed through skills transmitted across generations. The ecological footprint of a Kashmiri artisan is incomparably smaller than that of a synthetic textile facility. The challenge has been valorisation. This inherent circularity has remained uncertified, unmarketed, and unpriced in ways that could command a significant premium in global markets demanding traceability and provenance.
A container of Kashmiri saffron presented in a hand-carved walnut or papier-mâché vessel is a circular value chain made visible, collapsing the distance between agricultural production, artisanal craft, and consumer market in a single product. That convergence is worth considerably more than the sum of its parts. What J&K requires is a regionally calibrated framework that builds economic resilience through diversity and regeneration rather than extraction and volume.
Designing the Next Economy
The continued decline in global circularity rates, even as recycling volumes rise, tells a story about the limits of incremental approaches against exponential consumption growth. The problem was never a lack of awareness. It was a structural reluctance to redesign the systems that make consumption cheap and its consequences invisible.
India’s position is singular with a deep informal circularity economy, a material conservation ethic embedded in everyday practice, and a policy establishment beginning to embed circular principles into long-term planning architecture. What it requires is institutional capacity to connect these advantages to formal value chains without displacing the workers already sustaining them.
J&K’s opportunity is intimate in scale and reflective in implication. A region ecologically sensitive, culturally rich, and economically dependent on natural systems has every incentive to build circularity into its development foundation rather than retrofit it after the damage is done. The linear economy is being gradually undone by the compounding weight of its own consequences: the resource shocks it generates, the geopolitical frictions it intensifies, and the ecological ledger it can no longer avoid settling. The design question for the next economy is how to produce and how to value differently in the first place.
(The author is a pracademic working on government policy and public institutions. Ideas are personal.)
