Key takeaways
Lunar New Year is celebrated for two weeks across cultures in Asia and around the world. Globally, approximately two billion people observe the holiday each year. This month, the Pacific Environment Vietnam team launched a campaign to integrate environmental education into one of Vietnam’s most culturally significant moments: the Lunar New Year (known as Tết in Vietnam). We launched the Zero Waste Tết 2026 campaign as part of International Zero Waste Month, an initiative led by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) every January to educate, share and celebrate zero waste initiatives.
Zero Waste Tết 2026 focuses on bringing zero waste knowledge directly to primary school students. The campaign includes an online zero waste education program and an in-person interactive event for students and teachers. It builds on previous work that Pacific Environment has done during Lunar New Year to support environmentally sustainable cultural traditions.
Here are some of the ways that Lunar New Year is celebrated in Vietnam:
Lunar New Year, like many holiday celebrations around the world, has increasingly become a holiday of overconsumption and single-use waste. Waste from festivities, including mass-produced votive paper, styrofoam trays and plastic bags, has increasingly been found polluting rivers and lakes after the celebrations conclude.
For example, Kitchen God celebrations are increasingly causing plastic pollution in waterways. Vietnamese people believe that each household has a Kitchen God residing there, caring for and overseeing it. At the end of the lunar year, this Kitchen God will use fish to ascend to heaven to report to the Jade Emperor about the situation of the past year.
Many people in Vietnam have the custom of offering sacrifices and releasing fish into local waterways (rivers, lakes and ponds) so that the fish can carry the Kitchen God to heaven.However, now people often throw both the fish and the plastic bag into the water.
Tết is also a time for Vietnamese people to pay tribute to their ancestors and the deceased, and many people also burn votive paper that represents money for the deceased in the afterlife. In the past, votive paper was simply paper, but now it contains many toxic substances, and even plastic bags are used for burning in this tradition which is damaging for both the environment and human health.
Our Lunar New Year campaign focuses on bringing environmental education and practical zero waste skills to students and teachers that can be used both at home and school.
More than 1,000 students and teachers attended the Jan. 12 zero waste event at Quang An Primary School in Hanoi and Vietnam. The event was organized by Pacific Environment, in collaboration with the Youth for Environment Project led by the Vietnamese Stature Foundation (VSF) and Quang An Primary School.
Participants learned about plastic waste reduction and zero waste practices through hands-on learning including games and other interactive activities. The program ensured that education about plastic waste, recycling and zero waste — concepts that can often feel abstract to young audiences — were accessible and relevant to students’ daily lives, particularly in the context of the Lunar New Year.
All 1,000 students took part in five interactive mini-game stations. The stations addressed topics such as waste sorting, recycling pathways, plastic impacts on marine life, and environmental problem-solving. One hundred students also participated in the “The Golden Bell Contest,” a competition focused on plastic pollution, waste separation and zero waste.
The in-person event was paired with a month-long digital campaign providing additional educational resources with practical tips for how to celebrate a zero waste Tết.
The event also supported the development of more sustainable systems and behavior change at school. As part of the program, waste-sorting bins were provided to Quang An Primary School to enable teachers and students to separate their waste.
Zero Waste Tết 2026 contributed to building foundational environmental knowledge among children while aligning cultural traditions with sustainability. Worldwide, young people are leading zero waste and climate action by taking local action on global issues. By engaging students at an early age and linking zero waste principles to culturally relevant everyday practices, the campaign is fostering the next generation of more sustainable and responsible leaders and communities in Vietnam and around the world.
