A city in Sweden is trialling the use of crows to pick up discarded cigarette butts and other litter from the streets.
Wild birds in the city of Södertälje will be trained to pick up rubbish and place it into a machine which dispenses food.
Christian Günther-Hanssen, the founder of the company behind the method, Corvid Cleaning, told Swedish news agency TT that the wild birds were “taking part on a voluntary basis”. His firm chose crows as they are the most intelligent bird.
“They are easier to teach and there is also a higher chance of them learning from each other,” he said. At the same time, there’s a lower risk of them mistakenly eating any rubbish.”
More than 1 billion cigarette butts are left on Sweden’s streets every year, according to the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation. It constitutes around 62 per cent of all litter in the country.
Mr Günther-Hanssen claimed his method could help to save up to 75 per cent of costs involved with picking up cigarette butts in Södertälje.
“The estimation for the cost of picking up cigarette butts today is around 6p or more per cigarette butt, some say 1p. If the crows pick up cigarette butts, this would maybe be 1p per cigarette butt,” he said.
“The saving for the municipality depends on how many cigarette butts the crows pick up”.
The pilot project will initially be rolled out in one area of Södertälje before being rolled out across the city.
Tomas Thernström, a waste strategist at Södertälje municipality, said that the scheme would need to be financed properly in order to work.
“It would be interesting to see if this could work in other environments as well. Also from the perspective that we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground. That’s an interesting thought,” he said.
