Policy, Industry, Capital in the Same Three Days – Aditi Shukla on building GREENS 2026

“Most Indian sustainability shows end by four in the afternoon.”

Aditi Shukla is in her Ahmedabad office, three table-top layouts of the GREENS 2026 summit floor pinned behind her. She has spent fifteen years on India’s exhibition circuit. She is one of very few women running a national industrial show in this country. And on June 4, the show she has built will open at the Helipad Exhibition Centre in Gandhinagar.

“You do this for fifteen years, you learn to count the ones where something actually happened. Most years it is zero.”

The timing of GREENS 2026 is not accidental. On April 1 this year, three regulatory shifts the Indian waste and biogas sectors had been waiting on for years finally lined up on the same date. The Solid Waste Management Rules, 2026 came into force, making four-stream segregation (wet, dry, sanitary, special-care) and bio-methanation of the wet fraction legal obligations for the first time in Indian law. The Compressed Biogas Obligation tripled from 1% to 3% of national CNG and PNG blending, with a published path to 5% by 2029. And weeks earlier, Union Budget 2026–27 removed the excise duty on the biogas portion of blended CNG, a tax distortion that had held back the blending economy since 2023. The Supreme Court, in its February 19 order on solid waste, put it bluntly: “It is now or never.”

GREENS 2026, the Global Recycling & Waste Management Expo & Summit opens in Gandhinagar from June 4 to 6. Co-organised by SALT Alliances and the Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI), knowledge-partnered by Deloitte India, supported by the Gujarat Pollution Control Board. The first full trade gathering of India’s circular economy since the rules went live. TradeFairTimes sat down with Shukla to talk through how the show came together.

TFT: Why do Indian sustainability shows end by four in the afternoon?

Shukla: Because most of them are built as ceremonies, not as business events. You put up a sponsor wall. You invite a Minister for the lamp-lighting. You fill Day One with three panels of twelve speakers each, and not one person on those panels has the authority to decide anything in the room. Delegates need more. They come on Day One out of duty. They look around. They leave. I have watched entire halls empty by lunch on Day Two. It happens so often that nobody is even shocked by it anymore.

TFT: GREENS has thirteen sector tracks. That is a lot of programmes to curate. How do you avoid the same trap?

Shukla: We wrote one rule and applied it without exception. Every summit session has to be tied to a live regulatory instrument with a deadline in the next six to eighteen months. The SWM Rules. The CBG Obligation. The February Supreme Court directions. The NITI Aayog reports from January. The state-level CBG policies landing one after another. If a session cannot tell me what decision has to get made next quarter, it is off the programme. That one rule cut our first-draft session list in half. It was painful. It was also the right filter.

TFT: You claim that GREENS is the only event in the Indian calendar bringing policy, industry, and capital into the same room. Every show says something like that.

Shukla: I know. Which is why I am careful with the claim. Let me tell you what we have actually changed. At the normal Indian industry show, the regulator comes for the inaugural, gives a speech, gets photographed, and leaves. Industry shows up for Day Two. Capital does not show up at all… it appears as logos on the sponsor wall and nothing else. At GREENS, we have scheduled the regulators into working sessions, not keynotes. The industry tracks are built to feed into those sessions with operational questions and not “the future of plastics,” but “how will food-grade rPET be audited under FSSAI’s 40% mandate that took effect on April 1.” And we have built a curated-introductions function on the floor. Not a B2B lounge with coffee. Actual scheduled meetings, such as CBG producers with CGD entities, waste processors with Urban Local Body commissioners, and early-stage technology with sector-specific investors. That is the delivery mechanism. It is administrative work. It is what separates a show that closes deals from a show that prints badges.

TFT: Tell us about the floor.

Shukla: Three days, 15000+ expected exhibitors, spanning 18 sectors, and topics ranging from anaerobic digestion and biogas upgrading, AI-driven material recovery, shredding, wet-waste pre-processing, water treatment, magnetics, to the broader recycling machinery base. On the summit stage, a curated slate of public-service veterans, federation leaders, and founder-operators. We have decided to screen speakers and sessions diligently, to ensure there is something for everyone.

TFT: One last question. What does success look like on June 6, when the lights go down?

Shukla: Offtake agreements signed on the floor. A state pollution control board walking out with a four-stream implementation plan, they did not walk in with. An early-stage sorting technology meeting three sector investors they would have chased for six months otherwise. Footfall is the vanity metric. Those are the real ones. On June 6, we will have the count.

From the co-organiser

“Aditi builds shows the way SALT Alliances builds every platform… around the operational question, not the ceremonial one,” said Ketan Prajapati, Director, SALT Alliances. “GREENS 2026 is the first real test of what India’s circular economy looks like when the rules are live. She has built the room for that test.”

Delegate registration, media accreditation, exhibitor enquiries: www.greensexpo.com

GREENS is India’s national event for circular economy and waste management — bringing regulators, industry, technology, and capital into the same space across three days. The 2026 edition is built around the rules and questions the sector is dealing with right now, with summit content shaped in partnership with GCCI and Deloitte India.

About SALT Alliances

SALT Alliances is an Ahmedabad-based strategy and events firm that builds industry gatherings at the meeting point of policy, business, and capital.

Media contact

Ms. Shivangi Javia  | +91 7575808097 | marketing@greensexpo.com  | www.greensexpo.com