South Korean beauty brand Innisfree has attracted a lot of criticism after a bottle labeled as being made of paper turned out to be plastic simply wrapped in thin cardboard.

Innisfree,  a company that specializes in naturally-inspired beauty products, apparently didn’t expect anyone to actually check if the bottle for its face serum was actually made of paper, as suggested by the texture of the packaging and the “Hello, I’m paper bottle” branding printed on it. Only someone did check, slicing open the thin cardboard only to find a regular plastic bottle inside. This person posted photos of their discover on a Facebook group called “No Plastic Shopping,” and it didn’t take long for them to go viral.

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Who would have though that simply painting a mural on the side of a building would one day have the same pollution-cleaning effect as planting 780 trees?

Organized by the sportswear company Converse as part of their City-Forests campaign, the latest mural in the Polish city of Warsaw is not only an aesthetically pleasing artwork, but also an ingenious way to tackle urban pollution. Painted using photocatalytic paint with titanium dioxide, on a building that faces the busy metro station Politechnika, the ingenious mural reportedly attracts airborne pollutants before converting them into harmless nitrates through a chemical process involving sunlight.

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After struggling to convince members of his community to join him in making their streets and beaches cleaner by picking up trash, an Indonesian man put on a superhero outfit in hopes of becoming more convincing.

Rudi Hartono, a cafe worker from Pare-Pare, South Sulawesi, had long been struggling to persuade residents of his small coastal community to get more involved in keeping their home clean by picking up the plastic trash strewn on streets and beaches, but had had little success. But then he put on a Spiderman suit just to amuse his nephew, and people took notice. He accidentally became somewhat of a local role-model, and people started following his example.

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On September 21, volunteers across the globe, from Thailand to Hawaii, gathered on their local beaches to clean up trash and make a powerful statement about the poor state of our environment? But what about volunteers with no dirty beaches to clean? Well, some of them got a bit of help from local authorities.

Late last month, a South Korean mayor came under fire after revealing that he dumped a tonne of trash on a pristine beach just so hundreds of volunteers could clean it up the next day, in celebration of the International Coastal Cleanup Day. His office later apologized, saying that there wasn’t any trash for people to pick up, and that they only did it to “raise awareness about the seriousness of coastal waste”.

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Meet ‘Saalumarada’ Thimmakka, an uneducated environmentalist who, along with her late husband, planted and cared for 384 banyan trees in her hometown of Hulikal village, in Karnataka, India. Now 103 years old, she lives on to tell the tale.

When Thimmakka was a young girl, she married a farmer named Chikkaiah and together they made a living out of tilling land and cutting stones. The couple remained childless for many years, enduring crude remarks from their fellow villagers. But instead of wallowing in self-pity, they decided to make the best of their situation. “One day, we thought why not plant trees and tend to them like we would our children,” Thimmakka said.  

They started by grafting 10 saplings from the banyan trees that grew abundantly in their village. Using their meager resources, they planted those saplings on an empty stretch of land about four kilometers from the village. There wasn’t any water available in the area, so they filled four pails at their home and carried them all the way to the trees every single day. They protected the saplings from the elements, from animals and disease, until they took root. The next year, they planted 15 more saplings, 20 the year after that, and kept going until they planted a total of 384 trees, worth about 1.5 million rupees.

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