Seoul districts tackle festival waste with reusable containers, recycling stations

As Seoul's autonomous districts welcome the autumn festival season, they are also racing to cut the waste those events generate. A ban on the direct landfilling of household waste that took effect this year has turned garbage reduction from an option into an obligation for districts across the capital.

According to district officials, the 2026 Gangnam Festival ran along Dosan-daero from Oct. 3 to 5, transforming a busy road into a public celebration space. Gangnam-gu said a total of 166,000 people visited the festival grounds over the three days. Large crowds were drawn in particular to the Beer and Food Festa held as part of the K-Culture Festa on Dosan-daero and to the Global Master Chef Food Festival held around Bongeunsa-ro.

The sheer volume of visitors brought an equally large waste problem. In response, Gangnam-gu supplied reusable containers throughout the festival to reduce household waste — 34,400 for the Beer and Food Festa and 4,500 for the Global Master Chef Food Festival, for a total of more than 40,000. The district operated seven booths for container returns and recycling, staffed by about 20 workers.

"Food festivals inevitably require tableware, so we did our best to support the use of reusable containers to cut down on the waste that produces," a Gangnam-gu official said. "At the International Peace Marathon held Sunday, those same waste-reduction efforts helped us cut household waste generation in half compared with the previous year."

Seocho-gu took a similar approach at its Seoripul Music Festival, held last month on Banpo-daero after the road was closed to traffic. The district installed a total of 21 recycling and food-waste collection stations at various points around the venue, and deployed environmental officers to guide residents on proper waste sorting. On the festival's final day, those officers joined members of the public for a "Seoripul Cleanup Parade" to close out the event.

"Over the two days of the festival, we used a total of 4,840 reusable containers in an effort to minimize waste," a Seocho-gu official said. "We also installed drinking-water stations inside the venue so that visitors could use their own tumblers, which helped reduce the use of single-use plastic water bottles."

Gwanak-gu has joined the effort as well. At the 2026 Gwanak Gam Gam Chan Festival, running for three days through Sunday at Nakseongdae Park, the district is lending reusable cups from its sanitation department to event organizers to minimize single-use items, and is encouraging food trucks and other vendors to use reusable cups and plates.

The push by individual districts to reduce festival waste has gained added momentum this year with the introduction of the direct-landfill ban on household garbage.

Gangnam-gu is pursuing a district-wide waste-sorting campaign called "Healthy Resource Circulation, Wellth." Building on what it says was the largest waste-vinyl separation program ever run by a basic local government unit last year, the district is now running an awareness campaign to recover recyclables that residents mix in with general waste. To move beyond simple recycling promotion, Gangnam-gu has introduced a concept it calls "waste obesity" to describe the degree to which recyclables are mixed into household garbage bags.

"We express the situation intuitively in four stages — healthy, caution, alert and obese — based on the proportion of mixed waste in household garbage," a Gangnam-gu official said. "This has been effective in nudging residents to improve their waste-sorting behavior."

Those efforts have produced measurable results: from February through August this year, Gangnam-gu cut household waste by 1,463 tons compared with the same period last year, while recyclables collected rose by 1,269 tons over the same period.

Seocho-gu is also seeing a steady decline in annual waste volumes. According to the district, total annual household waste — including general garbage, food waste and recyclables — exceeded 100,000 tons every year from 2021 through 2023, but fell below 90,000 tons starting in 2024.

"We launched a 'waste-sorting pledge challenge' to encourage residents to practice proper separation in their daily lives, and that has driven meaningful public participation," a Seocho-gu official said. "We have also produced guides on correct recycling and waste-sorting methods and are distributing them to single-family homes and small apartment buildings."

The Seoul Metropolitan Government has also been actively promoting waste reduction since the Greater Seoul ban on direct landfilling of household waste took effect this year. Its flagship initiative, the "10 Million Citizens Household Waste Diet Project," evaluated all 25 autonomous districts over two months from February through March across four categories: waste reduction, increased recycling, citizen participation and specialized programs. As a result, daily household waste generation fell by 29 tons, while recyclables collected increased by 60 tons.