An intelligent bin aims to educate Kenyans how to correctly dispose of their rubbish. The added bonus: solar street lighting and free Wi-Fi.

Ghana's only glass blower says he is on a mission to reduce the country's glass waste and wasteful imports. Michael Tetteh built his own glassblowing studio in 2012 from scrap metal and clay bricks and today produces dozens of eclectic pieces each week from recycled TV screens, window panes and soda bottles.

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.

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.

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 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.

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".

In Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, women produce mushrooms from corn and bean waste. The farming protects the women from going into the field, where danger lures.

Young entrepreneur Juliet Namujju came up with an innovative idea to create masks made from upcycled waste, to allow hearing-impaired persons to lip-read and stay safe amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Lagos State Coconut Development Authority, LASCODA, is changing how coconut waste is managed by training people to turn it into arts and crafts.

A large quantity of waste, estimated at between 4,000 and 5,000 cubic metres, invades the dam of a hydroelectric power station on the Drina river in eastern Bosnia. One of Bosnia's five major rivers, the Drina is regularly polluted by the illegal dumps that arise along its banks. This waste is normally stopped by anti-pollution dams, which are located upstream of the power plants, and then collected. But during high water, these dams break under a large quantity of garbage that then invades the area in front of the dam of the power station.

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.