Swedish Company trained Crows to pick up Cigarette butts

The birds, which were chosen for their capacity to be taught such a skill, will be trained to pick up litter and discarded items through a feeding system.

For every butt deposited, the birds earn food. They collect the cigarettes, then drop them off in a specially designed machine.

The machine can distinguish between different types of objects, noting what is litter and what is material from nature, such as leaves. The project was launched by the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation, with founder Christian Günther-Hanssen insisting the birds were “taking part on a voluntary basis”.

Known as “Corvid Cleaning”, those involved are hoping the crows will help keep the costs of cleaning the city’s streets down. Mr. Günther-Hanssen predicts the pilot project could save the city around 75 percent of its current street cleaning costs, which amount to around £1.6m each year.

Cigarette butts are the No. 1 form of plastic pollution, with around 4.5 trillion tossed cigarette butts in the world today.

To keep the streets free of debris, Sweden spends around 20 million Swedish krona (about $2.2 million) on street sweeping. Günther-Hanssen believes that relying on wild crows to pick up cigarettes in exchange for food could reduce street-cleaning costs by 75% or more.

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