Winged Volunteers to Pick up Cigarette Butts

Sweden has hatched a unique solution to removing cigarette butts from city streets—crows.

The plan is to reward crows in the wild with food for every butt they pick up and drop into a machine designed by a startup company, Corvid Cleaning, The Hill reports. The machine automatically dispenses a small piece of bird food for every butt inserted.

The idea of using crows for litter cleanup is not new. In 2018, crows at a French theme park were trained to pick up cigarette butts and dump them into a box.

Cigarette butts have long been the most abundant form of plastic pollution in the world, with people tossing about 4.5 trillion butts each year. Cigarette filters can take up to 10 years to completely decompose and the chemicals they release, including arsenic, lead, and nicotine, can linger in the environment even longer.

In Sweden alone, more than 1 billion cigarette butts are tossed onto streets, making up 62% of the country’s litter. The founder of Corvid Cleaning believes crows are intelligent enough to pick up litter for a reward and can save the Swedish cities up to 75% in cleanup costs.