The Swedish town of Södertälje near Stockholm uses a special weapon against cigarette butts on the street: crows. The birds are trained to pick up the polluting butts and dump them into a special machine. As a reward, the crows get some nuts.
Södertälje houses the headquarters of the research and development department of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical giant that developed one of the corona vaccines together with the University of Oxford. But the city of less than 80,000 inhabitants is now in the news with something completely different.
To save on the costs of cleaning services, a small start-up in Södertälje trains crows to pick up abandoned cigarette butts. The wild birds are willing to do this in exchange for some food, which they receive with every cigarette butt they put in the machine provided for that purpose. “These are wild birds that participate voluntarily,” said Christian Günther-Hanssen, founder of Corvid Cleaning, the company behind the method. Aftonbladet. He is the man who invented and developed this kind of candy machine for the crows. “It took me about two years to get the machine ready,” says Günther-Hanssen. “But the crows understood the principle pretty quickly, after a month or so.”
Cigarette butts make up a whopping 62 percent of all litter in Sweden, according to the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation. More than 1 billion cigarette butts end up on Swedish streets and squares. Södertälje spends 20 million Swedish crowns (1.9 million euros) on street cleaning. Günther-Hanssen estimates that the crows could save at least 75 percent of the cost of clearing cigarette butts in the city.
A pilot project is underway in Södertälje which, if successful, could be extended to the entire city. The biggest concern is the health of the birds, because after all, it is about cigarette butts with nicotine in them.
The guinea pigs are flip flops, a species that can be taught as quickly as seven-year-old children. That makes these crows the smartest birds for the job. According to Günther-Hanssen, this also “reduces the risk that they would accidentally eat the butts”.
Another thought from Tomas Thernström, waste strategist at Södertälje: “It’s an interesting idea that we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts, but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground”.
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