Kunal Shah

Kunal Shah did not start in waste, he started in water, and he is unusually honest about how hard that first decade was. He spent his early career at VA Tech Wabag, the Indian-listed water-treatment company he still calls his "alma mater," selling thirty- and forty-million-dollar wastewater contracts to large, bureaucratic utilities across Asia. As he puts it, water is "an aged club, in the right spirit, where either you have white hair or no hair to be taken seriously," an industry built less on technology than on relationships, trust and patience, which is a tough school for a young chemical engineer out of the University of Pune. That apprenticeship in how the water world actually buys things is the thread that runs through everything he did next.

Kunal Shah moved into the waste world in 2017 when he joined Anaergia, eventually becoming its Chief Growth Officer and managing director for Asia. Anaergia is a Toronto-headquartered, Toronto-listed company whose name literally means "anaerobic energy," and that is exactly what it does: it takes the organic waste we would rather not think about, the sludge from wastewater plants, food waste, municipal organic waste, and runs it through anaerobic digestion, which is a controlled, oxygen-free process where bacteria eat the waste and give off biogas. Clean that biogas up and you get renewable natural gas, electricity and a Class A fertilizer, so the same truckload of waste that used to cost a city money to bury becomes something a city can sell. Kunal Shah's pitch was that this is the circular economy made real, a way for a water utility to turn its dirtiest, most energy-hungry headache into a source of energy and revenue.

Kunal Shah's flagship proof point was the Rialto Bioenergy Facility in California, and on the show he held it up as evidence that Anaergia would build at scale where financiers and contractors were too nervous to go. Rialto was genuinely ambitious: completed in 2020, it was the largest food-waste-to-energy plant in North America, designed to swallow 700 tonnes of food waste and 300 tonnes of biosolids a day and built to feed California's SB 1383 law, the rule meant to keep organic waste out of landfills. The "fall" in the episode title is the part Kunal Shah does not duck. When the pandemic slowed the flow of sorted food waste that SB 1383 was supposed to deliver, the plant could not get enough to eat, the subsidiary that owned it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2023, and it was eventually sold to Sevana Bioenergy for twenty million dollars in 2024. It is a real lesson in how first-of-a-kind infrastructure can be right about the technology and still get hurt by the timing of a policy it cannot control.

Kunal Shah's one consistent theme, across both the water years and the waste years, is that you cannot ask a customer to take a risk you are not taking yourself. That is the same instinct that has him collecting roles outside any single company: he represents the Asia-Pacific region on the World Biogas Association, helps run the Singapore Water Association, and sits on the XPRIZE water-scarcity advisory board. He has since moved on from Anaergia, and today, as senior vice president for global asset outsourcing at Aquatech, he is back in industrial water, building water and critical-minerals infrastructure, which is a neat way of saying he has spent fifteen years on every side of the same idea, that the cleverest thing you can do with a waste stream is refuse to treat it as waste. The Anaergia numbers here are cross-checked against my Leviathan database, and the story comes from his own words on the recorded episode.

“We just can't be living in the glory that we have the best technology in the world. We have to demonstrate our solutions at scale. And if people don't bet on it, we bet on it. How fair is it if you don't bet on your own technology, why should a utility guy bet on your own technology?”

Kunal Shah is, in the end, a salesman in the best sense of the word: someone who learned in water's slowest, most relationship-driven corner how to get cautious utilities to say yes, and who has spent his career pointing that skill at the unglamorous waste streams most of the industry would rather ignore.