Crows will be sent to clean up dropped cigarette butts and other rubbish from Swedish streets.
In the city of Södertälje, wild birds are being taught to pick up trash and deposit it in a machine. The machine will then administer food to them in a step-by-step process.
The procedure is part of The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation‘s ‘Corvid Cleaning’ pilot project. It aims to reduce the cost of street cleaning in the city.
The company’s founder, Christian Günther-Hanssen, reckons that using crows may reduce Södertälje by at least 75% of its street cleaning expenditures. It presently totals 20 million Swedish kroner (£1,601,518).
He also stated that the wild birds were ‘taking part on a voluntary basis. Also, they were ‘easier to teach’ than other birds.
‘They are easier to teach, and there is also a higher chance of them learning from each other,’ he told the Swedish news agency TT.
‘At the same time, there’s a lower risk of them mistakenly eating any rubbish.’
Crows are taught to pick up cigarette butts and toss them into a special vending machine in their training.
The bird will get rewards in the form of food from the vending machine. It will be able to distinguish the litter from other things such as stones and leaves.
Günther-Hanssen stated that picking up one cigarette butt costs the city roughly 6p or more. But that if the crows were on work, it would cost the city around 1p per cigarette butt.
He added: ‘The saving for the municipality depends on how many cigarette butts the crows pick up.’
Mr. Günther-Hanssen said the foundation previously trained hooded crows, but magpies and jackdaws are likely to join the initiative soon.
Six crows got training to pick up rubbish and put it in a box at France’s Puy du Fou theme park in 2018.
Speaking at the time Nicolas de Villiers, the resort’s president, said: ‘The goal is not just to clear up, because the visitors are generally careful to keep things clean. But to show nature itself can teach us to take care of the environment.’
In 2017, Crowded Cities, a Dutch company, attempted to train crows to pick up cigarette butts in order to help with trash on the streets.
Officials pulled off the research in 2018 because there were ‘too few resources to continue the project’. Also, there was not a ‘clear picture of what the effects would be on crows and the environment.