Swedish City Uses Wild Crows To Clean Up Litter

A city in Sweden is testing out the idea of using wild crows to clean cigarette butts around the city, and the results are promising!

Swedish entrepreneur Christian Günther-Hanssen founded Corvid Cleaning with the idea of training crows to clean litter from the streets in exchange for some treats.

With a method in place, Christian is now testing the idea in the city of Södertälje, where an estimated $2.2 million is spent on street cleaning each year. According to the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation, an estimated %62 of the litter is cigarette butts.

If the cigarettes were removed from the equation, the city could save a significant amount of money on street cleaning and put the money toward other projects and innovations. With that in mind, Christian started working on a machine to reward wild New Caledonian crows for picking up the butts.

How it works is that when the birds pick up a cigarette butt and insert it into a special vending machine, the birds are rewarded with a tasty treat. Because crows are so smart, they quickly learn to pick up the butts in exchange for a treat!

The process allows the birds to clean up litter if they want, but it doesn’t force them to do anything.

The pilot project still has a ways to go, as many questions remain unanswered. Namely, people want to know how the birds might be affected from constantly picking up cigarettes or how their behavior might change if they’re always being rewarded with treats.

On the Corvid Cleaning website, they explain that they plan to monitor the bird’s for levels of dangerous compounds and also hope to improve their diets with the use of the “treats.” They noted that birds in urban settings often have poor diets due to eating so much human food, so the project could be quite beneficial for the wild crow populations in the area.

Watch the video below to see the crows in action: