It wasn’t all bad

Coca Cola, Carlsberg and L’Oreal have lent their support to an initiative to create biodegradable bottles made from sustainably grown crops. Organised by the Dutch renewable chemicals company Avantium, the “Paper Bottle Project” aims to mass produce cardboard bottles that are lined with a plant-based polymer. The polymer is said to degrade in a composter within a year. If simply left outside, it will rot away in a few years, whereas plastic lasts hundreds of years.

A 91-year-old from

Norfolk has knitted a hospital to raise money for NHS charities.

Margaret Seaman’s

“Knittingale Hospital” has wards, medical staff, patients, an X-ray department and a coffee shop. Meanwhile, in

Chichester, a five-year-old boy has run 14 miles in a week to raise hundreds of pounds for a local homeless charity. Kian Stone told his mother he wanted to help after realising that you can’t “stay home” if you don’t have a home. In Belgium, a maintenance company is helping people to keep in touch with their relatives in care homes, by lifting them up to their bedroom windows in its cranes.

For the first time in well over 600 years, white stork chicks have hatched in the wild in the UK. The chicks are in one of three nests at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, and are the offspring of a pair that tried and failed to breed there last year. The White Stork Project, which is closely monitoring the nest, is hoping to restore a population of at least 50 breeding pairs by 2030. The most recent record of storks breeding in the wild in Britain was in 1416, but more than 100 have been bred in captivity and released in recent years.