West Africa’s waste collection app

Two young Cape Verdeans turn used glass bottles and leftover PVC piping into vases and lamps for homes, bars and restaurants. And this is just the beginning of their "recycling with style".

A startup in West Africa has developed an app to help improve the efficiency of collecting and recycling waste. It connects homes and institutions with plastic and metal recycling collectors with the click of a button.

Indian vets extract 71 kilograms (156.5 pounds) of plastic, nails and other garbage from a pregnant cow, but both the animal and her baby died. An estimated five million cows roam India's cities, with many gorging on the vast amounts of plastic litter on the streets.

A young Angolan inventor is tackling his community's electricity and waste problems with one simple machine: an "organic" generator powered by food scraps.

Fifteen year-old Esohe Ozigbo is part of a group of youth that take part in community clean-ups, tree planting programs, and ''trashion shows'' in Lagos.

Driving the streets of London in an old milk float, Ella Shone delivers food and household products sold without packaging and without plastic. Created last year during the first coronavirus lockdown, her "top-up truck" has not been short of orders since, selling lentils, nuts and even vinegar or laundry detergent to customers using their own containers.

South Korea is boosting efforts to recycle plastics in the country. At special centres, used PET bottles are recycled and transformed into products such as clothes, food containers, and cosmetic bottles.

Alarmed by the mountains of plastic waste leaching into Indonesia's waters, two best friends are taking on the environmental menace by turning crisp bags and shampoo packets into paving bricks.

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.

Liver cancer is strikingly prevalent in West Africa. Specialists point to high rates of hepatitis as a likely cause, but the region is not well equipped to deal with the epidemic.

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.