Every day, it seems that creative and forward-thinking people are responding to the rising demand for inventions that are both useful and ecologically conscious. Some products seem to be straight out of Black Mirror—with their sleek, modern designs—while others are still in their clunky trial stages. We’ve compiled a list of ten green creations that give us hope for the future of our planet. 1. The Ocean Cleanup 23-year-old boy genius, Boyan Slat, is the founder and president of The Ocean Cleanup, a foundation which is dedicated to developing advanced technologies to rid the oceans of plastic.  The Dutch inventor is in the works of creating a 62-mile underwater, V-shaped barrier to trap plastic trash as it floats along ocean currents. Slat said the technology, which he hopes to deploy by 2020, could remove half of the trash—amounting to 150 million pounds of trash—from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within 10 years. Once removed, much of that plastic could be properly recycled. 2. AVA

  A video from Punjab which became viral in June showed a newly married woman—wedding bangles (chooda) on her wrists—taking drugs. She put a lighted candle below a foil and snorted what was thought to be chitta—Punjab's notorious synthetic drug made from heroin and other substances. The video indicates that Punjab's drug problem is not restricted to the typical demographic of unemployed youth. It is rampant across divides such as class, gender, age and geography. No wonder, the Punjab government recently ordered all its employees to undergo drug tests. A crackdown on drugs by the state government after Capt Amarinder Singh came to power last year has led to arrests of a large number of peddlers and choked supply routes. Yet there is no end to the problem. In June this year, dozens of drug-related deaths were reported in the state. In the last few years, while the business and economy in the state kept sliding, the drugs trade flourished. With addicts turning peddlers and severa