At the end of rice harvesting season, the folks of the Kagawa and Niigata Prefectures in Japan hold a straw festival to celebrate the abundance of the harvest. Dried straws cover wooden frames to form larger-than-life sculptures from animals like sharks and gorillas to vessels such as ships and tanks. The family-friendly event invites visitors of all ages to engage, interact, and play on the enormous structures.

A boy carries empty sacks after bringing different types of plastic materials to a recycling station in Khartoum North April 16, 2015. People bring bottles and other plastic materials to the station for recycling, and get paid in return. (Photo by Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah/Reuters)

An employee sorts waste at the Wecycler recycling centre in Ebutte Meta district in Lagos, Nigeria July 28, 2016. (Photo by Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters)

In a 200-acre-plus dump 5 kilometers north of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, hundreds of men, women and children scavenge day and night through the burning wasteland. They earn $12 to $15 a day – on a good day – for recycling plastics as well as clothing, household items and aluminum (for smelting). Some 5,000 tons of waste is created each day in the Port-au-Prince area. (Photo and caption by Giles Clarke/Getty Images Reportage)

Jan Kara (R) and Jan Holan pedal their boat, made with plastic bottles, on the Elbe river near Kostelec nad Labem July 15, 2014. Jan Kara, a 22-year-old student, and Jakub Bures, a 22-year-old car mechanic, built the 10-metre (32.8-feet) long boat from 5000 plastic bottles strapped to a wooden frame. (Photo by David W. Cerny/Reuters)

In this photo illustration a plastic carrier bag is blown along the road by the wind on March 4, 2008 in Birmingham, England. (Photo illustration by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Members of the general public enjoy the “BEACH” at the National Building Museum August 25, 2015 in Washington, DC. The “BEACH” is an interactive architectural installation, with an “ocean” of nearly one million recyclable translucent plastic balls, that brings the experience of going to the beach indoor. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

A creative Dad brings family-favourite cartoon characters to life by putting them into hilarious situations. You would be forgiven for thinking that the following images are created using Photoshop – but complete with real fire and coffee splashes, Mitchel Wuís images are all shot in real-time. Using plastic toy characters from family-favourite films such as Toy Story, Star Wars, ET and The Muppets, the California-based photographer puts the plastic characters into surreal situations. (Photo by Mitchel Wu/Barcroft Images)