Five hospitals in the United Kingdom have installed new machines from a Cardiff-based company which melts items made of polypropylene, such as face masks, separating out impurities to make plastic blocks recycled into chairs, buckets or 3D-printed items.

Nina Gomes is no average environmentalist. With bright pink goggles and just 4 years old, she picks trash with her father from the water along the beaches of Rio de Janeiro. With Nina in tow, Gomes sets out on a paddleboard into the picturesque but polluted waters of Rio's Guanabara Bay, where she grabs plastic bottles and bags and puts them in a mesh net.

Thousands of tons of refuse are being cleared from Germany's flood-hit regions. Removing unprecedented mountains of belongings is a challenge, but it is also helping residents begin to move forward.

A distillery in the Highlands of Scotland is using waste from its whisky production process to create biofuel for trucks. Managers at the distillery say the fuel has the potential to save about 250 tons of carbon emissions for trucks on the road.

In Africa, poorer nations are fighting a double-edged sword: The rapid spread of the highly infectious delta variant and lack of immunizations. Inequalities worldwide are being exposed as richer countries take the lion's share, poorer nations are struggling to get jabs into arms.

Volunteers from Lima’s soup kitchens are calling on supermarkets to allow them to collect any excess food, to feed the rising number of families relying on their services to survive. In Peru, poverty has risen over the course of the pandemic to affect almost a third of the population.

With greenhouses as far as the eye can see, the southern Spanish region of Andalusia has been nicknamed the "Sea of Plastic". Intensive farming is the norm and it helps feed the European market with fruit and vegetables all year long. It also produces an estimated 33,000 tonnes of plastic waste every year. Until two years ago, this waste was exported to countries such as China, Pakistan and Turkey. But now that these countries are refusing to take rubbish from rich countries, the "Sea of Plastic" is faced with the urgent challenge of recycling its own waste. Our correspondents report.

Syrians use olive waste to create 'birin', a biomass fuel to be used to heat homes during the winter as an alternative to diesel, which few families can now afford in Syria's Idlib province.

Kenya's Albert Korir won the men's New York Marathon for the first time on Sunday with a time of 2 hours 8 minutes and 22 seconds.His compatriot Peres Jepchirchir, the reigning Olympic champion, secured the women's title yet again in the iconic race with a time of 2 hours 22 minutes and 39 seconds.

Tetiꞌaroa, an almost deserted Pacific island northeast of Tahiti, is a sanctuary for birds, sea turtles and all sorts of marine life. The atoll is perhaps most famous for being bought by US actor Marlon Brando. But this picturesque French Polynesian island is being invaded by plastic waste washed ashore by ocean tides. As a result, a team of volunteers have been to Tetiꞌaroa for a clean-up operation. Our colleagues from Polynésie la première report, with FRANCE 24's Jennie Shin.

Award-winning biowaste converters are helping farmers in Ivory Coast turn mountains of agricultural by-products into compost for their fields or gas for their cooking stoves.

An American company has developed a liquid that can extend the shelf life of fruit and vegetables. Apeel is based on natural compounds and controls the factors that cause fruit to age.