Saving our oceans: The battle against plastic pollution

Cosmetic plastic surgery includes surgical and nonsurgical procedures that enhance and reshape structures of the body to improve appearance and confidence. Here are a few things you should know to avoid botched body enhancement surgeries.

Waste To Wealth: Plastic often recycled into pillows, mattresses

It's Christmas Day and following a year which has been harrowing for so many, we've decided to look back at the good news of 2020. We begin in Uganda, where a plastics company that specialises in recycling switched from making building materials to face shields to help hospitals. We also go to Benin, where the closure of the border with Nigeria has led to a push for more locally produced food, some of it on rooftops. And our correspondent in DR Congo looks back at how an NGO is helping Ebola survivors turn their lives around.

An army of volunteers helps clean up a massive haul of plastic polluting Bali's famous Kuta beach.

It is the largest and most beautiful beach in Lagos, but also the dirtiest: at Lighthouse, plastic washed up by the sea piles up on the sand. Faced with what looks like an ecological disaster, a group of Lagossians have come together to clean the beach.

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.

Detailed and incredibly realistic replicas of meals have been on show outside Japanese restaurants for more than 100 years. An establishment's success can depend on how well its dishes look in the window.

But a series of new laws in effect since January 2020 aim to significantly reduce plastic pollution over five years by phasing out single-use plastic, encouraging research and development of plastic alternatives and improving waste management and recycling.

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.

Facilities to encourage visitors to avoid the use of single use plastics are installed by several NGOs and the municipality at the Ayia Triada beach in Paralimni. The beach is now equipped with a water station for cold, filtered and free water. It includes an area for smokers and signs with information on how the visitors can become part of the solution, not the problem are also found at selected points.

As Ivorian artist Aristide Kouame combs the beach dragging a trash bag of waterlogged flip-flops, he is aware other beachgoers in the commercial capital Abidjan think he is a desperate trader or a madman.