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How far is the nearest street bin?

This explorer maps how far a pedestrian anywhere in Seoul is from the nearest public street bin. Seoul is divided into 25 m points; for each point we measure the straight-line distance to the nearest registered bin location and average it over 250 m cells (Visualization) or summarise it per administrative dong (Statistics). A walk of at covers about , which we use as the reference distance a person might accept to throw something away. The slider at the bottom changes that walking tolerance from 30 seconds to 5 minutes; colours and statistics update with it.

Bins that only take cigarette butts are excluded. Positions are geocoded from road addresses, so they are address-level, not the exact spot on the pavement. Distances are straight lines, not walking routes, and bins just outside the city boundary are not in the register, so edges of the city read worse than they are. Mountains and the Han River appear far from any bin even though few people stand there; weighting by Seoul's hourly living population is the next step, and an hour-of-day slider like the original explorer's is reserved for it.


Bins - Seoul Metropolitan Government, street waste bin installation status, Nov 2025
Dong boundaries - Statistics Korea SGIS (KOGL Type 1) via vuski/admdongkor (CC BY 4.0)
City boundary - © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)
Basemap - © CARTO, © OpenStreetMap contributors
Map engine - MapLibre GL JS; graphs - D3.js
Interface adapted from Manhattan Population Explorer by Justin Fung (Apache-2.0)

Click a dong to see how far its residents walk to a bin.
Mean distance to a bin:
Street bins (locations):
Area: