Sweden trains crows to clean up cigarette butts off streets

A Swedish startup company came up with an innovative and inexpensive idea to clean up its streets: hire birds. The Swedish firm, named Södertälje is training and deploying crows to pick up discarded cigarette butts from the streets. Known as scavengers of nature, crows already have an embedded trait of picking up stuff. The pilot project called Corvid Cleaning comes from The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation and aims to lower the costs of street cleaning in the city of Sodertalje.Founder Christian Gunther-Hanssen said,crows would be the best bet because of their intelligence.They’re wild birds taking part on a voluntary basis.

Swedish enterprise Corvid Cleaning is testing a reward-based system where crows picking up cigarette butts and drop them into a trash can. Peanuts are then dispensed as a reward pic.twitter.com/3qjF2JrX0s

— Reuters (@Reuters) February 2, 2022

“They are easier to teach and there is also a higher chance of them learning from each other,” he told Swedish news agency TT. “At the same time, there’s a lower risk of them mistakenly eating any rubbish.” The birds are trained through a step-by-step process to pick up the trash, place it into a machine that dispenses food for them. More than one billion cigarette butts litter Sweden’s streets every year, making up more than 60% of the country’s garbage problem, according to the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation. Gunther-Hanssen estimates the crows could save the city of Södertälje at least 75% of what it is currently spending on street cleaning, which is about $2.8 million (20 million krona). He also pointed out that the birds were neither captured nor forced to do the dirty work. “”