From Jaipur's Stadiums to Tulsa's Compost Piles
27 Oct 2026 · @Gaurav Sharma
Written by Gaurav Sharma, Professional Fellow visiting Tulsa from Jaipur, India
I travelled halfway around the world to Tulsa expecting to learn about recycling systems. What I keep learning about instead is people.
My name is Gaurav Sharma, and I am in Oklahoma this fall as a Professional Fellow. The Professional Fellows Program is an exchange of the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and in Oklahoma it is run by the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College. Since 2012, the program has brought emerging leaders from South Asia to work alongside Oklahoma organizations, building partnerships meant to outlast the visit. Back home in Jaipur, Rajasthan, I spend my days building innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems. I lead ACIC-VGU Foundation, an incubation center backed by India's Atal Innovation Mission, where we have supported more than 180 startups, many of them student-led. But the work closest to my heart is the least glamorous thing you can imagine: trash.
Why I chose waste
In India, waste is everywhere you look, and so is the opportunity to fix it. A single wedding, cricket match or music festival can leave behind mountains of mixed waste in a few hours. Much of it could be recovered, composted or recycled if someone planned for it before the first guest arrived.
That realization pulled me in. In 2016 I founded Thankyou with a simple vision: a world without waste. We built decentralized, fully automatic waste systems that are affordable enough to actually be used. Today they run in more than 120 hotels, restaurants, university campuses and private estates, turning waste into compost, biogas and recycled material. Together they have kept over 30,000 metric tons of waste out of landfills and avoided more than 120,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Somewhere along the way, the national media started calling me the "Trashman of Rajasthan." I wear that name proudly. It reminds me that solving a problem often starts with being willing to stand next to it.
What Trash Company does
Trash Company is a sustainable waste management venture built for places where lots of people gather. We focus on two areas:
Sustainable events. Concerts, festivals, marathons and cricket matches, planned so that what is left behind is sorted, recovered and kept out of landfills.
Zero-waste programs for hotels and other bulk waste generators. Hotels, campuses and large kitchens generate waste every single day. We help them build systems that cut it at the source: segregation built into daily routines, staff who understand why it matters, on-site composting for food waste, and regular tracking so progress is measured rather than assumed.
On the ground, our approach follows waste from the moment it is created to the moment it is reported. We set up separate bins for dry and wet waste, and station a volunteer beside them, not to police people but to explain. We train vendors and housekeeping teams before the gates open. We bring composting machines and plastic crushers on site, so visitors can watch their cups and food scraps being processed in real time. Surplus food goes to partners who redistribute it to communities that need it. And at the end, we weigh, sort and record everything, so every event closes with an impact report rather than a guess.
We organize all of this around five simple words: refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose and recycle. Recycling comes last on purpose. The best waste is the waste that is never created.
How we want to do this matters as much as what we do. A few principles guide us:
Plan before the first guest arrives. Waste is designed into an event long before anyone throws anything away, through vendor choices, packaging and how food is served.
Make it easy and visible. Clear bins, friendly volunteers and live processing on site do more than any sign telling people what not to do.
Treat people as participants, not problems. Fans, staff and vendors are invited into the effort, not lectured.
Measure everything. If we cannot show the numbers at the end, we have not finished the job.
Leave something behind. Each event should leave a trained team, a better habit or a partnership that lasts beyond the day.
One more principle runs through everything we do: the people who already handle India's waste matter. Informal waste workers do much of the country's recycling, often unseen. A circular economy that leaves them out is not one I want to build.
We have been fortunate to work with a wide range of organizations, from the Government of Rajasthan, Indian Railways and IndianOil to hospitality brands, universities, and partners such as the Rajasthan Royals and Global Shapers Community.
Why a stadium is a classroom
If you want to change how people think about waste, go where they are already excited. In India, that is very often a cricket ground.
For readers less familiar with the sport: the Indian Premier League is the country's biggest professional sports league, and its matches fill stadiums night after night for weeks. Working with the Rajasthan Royals, one of the league's franchises, puts sustainability in front of tens of thousands of fans at once. Nobody comes to a match for a lecture on recycling. But when the bins are clear, the volunteers are friendly and the stadium looks cleaner at the end of the night, people notice. Some of them take that habit home.
The numbers surprised even us. Our zero-waste stadium pilot with the Rajasthan Royals processed more than 10 metric tons of waste per match. Over three seasons, that added up to 200 tons from a single stadium, all of it handled alongside campaigns that asked fans to think about what they consume.
One of my favorite images from our campaigns is a handwritten cardboard sign that reads: "Can we be a climate responsible fan?" It is a question, not a rule. That is the tone we try to set everywhere, whether at a cricket match or at the AU Jaipur Marathon, where runners and spectators met our dry and wet waste stations along the way.
Music festivals show where this can go next.
A festival is a small temporary city, and its footprint reaches far beyond the bins. How do artists and fans travel there? What food is served, and what happens to what is left? How much water is used, what merchandise is sold, and what powers the stage? When you start asking these questions, the answers point to simple changes: carpooling and shared transport for fans, water refill stations instead of plastic bottles, surplus food passed on to people who need it, and artists and crew who champion the effort from the stage. In India, even street theatre (nukkad natak, as we call it) can carry the message from the festival grounds into the city. Waste is where the conversation starts, but carbon responsibility is where it leads.
I have come to believe that events and sports do three things policy alone cannot:
They create shared moments. Strangers cheering for the same team are already a community. Asking them to sort a cup correctly is a small ask inside a big feeling.
They make the work visible. A clean venue after a festival is proof, not a promise.
They bring unlikely partners to one table. A sports franchise, a hotel group, a city department and a waste worker co-operative rarely meet. An event gives them a reason to.
What Tulsa is teaching me - Immersing myself in Tulsa's ecosystem
As part of the fellowship, each fellow is placed with an American organization in their field. I am proud that mine is The Sustainability Alliance. Over the coming weeks, my plan is less about attending meetings and more about immersion: understanding how Tulsa's sustainability ecosystem actually works, from the ground up. I want to see it through the eyes of the people who do this work every day:
Community composting, where food waste becomes soil at a neighborhood scale
Clean energy, where solar moves from idea to rooftop
Landfills and engineering, where the true cost of what we throw away becomes visible
Recycling operations, the unseen work behind every blue bin
State regulators, who set the rules and support the systems that make waste management possible
Youth programs, where recycling habits begin long before adulthood
The scale here is different from Jaipur, and so is the infrastructure. But I suspect the challenge underneath is the same. Systems only work when people trust them, understand them and take part in them. A compost bin is a technology. A neighbor who shows you how to use it is a movement. I am here to learn how Tulsa builds both, and to share what has worked for us in India.
Sustainability is a people business
We often talk about sustainability in terms of technology, targets and regulations. Those matter. But in my experience, the projects that last are the ones people feel part of.
Last year I made this argument in an essay for the World Economic Forum: we should stop talking about saving the planet and start talking about saving ourselves. The Earth has survived ice ages and mass extinctions. What is fragile is everything we have built on it: our health, our food, our jobs, our homes. When people connect climate change to their own families, they act.
I saw this first-hand at the stadium. When we framed waste as a matter of public health, dignity and pride rather than rules, behavior shifted. Stadium staff and fans alike began to take ownership. It is the same lesson I shared at TEDxAnandNagar in my talk Climate Change: Re-looking from a new lens: local stories move people in a way top-down mandates rarely do.
The hotel housekeepers who sort waste correctly because they understand why. The cricket fans who carry their bottle to the right bin because the stadium made it easy. The young entrepreneur who builds a business out of what others throw away. None of them appear in a policy document, yet all of them decide whether the policy works.
That is why I think events, sports and community gatherings deserve a bigger place in the sustainability conversation. They are where habits are formed in public, and where people discover they are not acting alone. Tulsa already understands this. A city that rallies around its neighborhoods, its teams and its local businesses has everything it needs to make sustainability a shared experience rather than a chore.
Let's build something together
I am in Tulsa until the end of November, and I would love to meet more of you. If you are an entrepreneur working on waste or clean energy, a business looking to cut what you send to landfill, a university team researching circular systems, or someone who organizes events, races or games, let's talk.
I am especially curious about:
How Tulsa's events and sports venues handle waste, and what fans respond to
Collaborations between Tulsa and Jaipur, whether student exchanges, startup programs or shared research
Ideas that worked here and could travel to India, and the reverse
You can reach me at gaurav@trashcompany.in or on LinkedIn. I am grateful to The Sustainability Alliance for welcoming me into this community. Some of the best ideas I have ever encountered began with a cup of coffee and a stranger who cared about the same thing I did. I hope this is the start of a few more.
Meet Gaurav: Visiting Professional Fellow
Gaurav Sharma leads Trash Company (Green Spaces Solutions LLP), a Jaipur-based venture that makes events and hotels sustainable and is known in his home state as the "Trashman of Rajasthan." He is also CEO of ACIC-VGU Foundation, an Atal Innovation Mission-backed incubation center at Vivekananda Global University. A three-time TEDx speaker, he mentors with The Climate Reality Project and the Global Shapers Oxford Hub and is a Rajeev Circle Fellow of the Motwani Jadeja Foundation. He is in Oklahoma in fall 2026 as a fellow of the U.S. Department of State's Professional Fellows Program, implemented by the University of Oklahoma, with a placement focused on sustainability.
Gaurav also founded Thankyou Waste in 2016, whose decentralized waste systems have diverted more than 30,000 metric tons of waste from landfills. At ACIC-VGU he has supported 180+ startups and mobilized over USD 4 million from government schemes and CSR partners. He was selected for the inaugural Future50 cohort of the World Economic Forum's Global Shapers Community, co-led Shape South Asia in 2024, and hosts the podcast Behind the Success with Gaurav Sharma. His recognitions include Patrika 40 Under 40 (2021).
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