Crows trained to clean up cigarette butts on Swedish streets

The wild crows pick up cigarette butts on a voluntary basis and are allowed to come and go as they please, says the owner of Corvid Cleaning in Sweden.

Tired of cigarette butts littering their streets, one Swedish city is handing over the solution to the birds.

A startup company in the city of Södertälje, near Stockholm, has designed a machine that will feed crows a little bit of food for every cigarette butt they bring back and deposit in the device.

The company, Corvid Cleaning, believes their device could help save the city money when it comes to cleaning up the unsightly refuse.

In fact, founder Christian Günther-Hanssen told The Guardian he expects that crows could cut the city’s butt removal budget by 75 per cent.

The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation says the city of Södertälje spends about $2.7-million on street cleaning per year, and that more than one billion cigarette butts are flicked onto Sweden’s streets annually.

Günther-Hanssen told Swedish online news site The Local that he only uses wild birds for his business and that any participating crows are “taking part on a voluntary basis.”

He said because crows are so intelligent, they can be trained quite quickly using a step-by-step method.

“They are easier to teach and there is also a higher chance of them learning from each other. At the same time, there’s a lower risk of them mistakenly eating any rubbish,” he said.