How crows are being trained to keep a Swedish town clean

Image used for representational purposes. AFP

Did you know that cigarette butts are the most abundant form of plastic pollution in the world with about 4.5 trillion individual butts being tossed every year?

Keeping these figures in mind, a start-up company in Sweden’s Södertälje has trained wild crows to pick up cigarette butts they see on the street, and deposit them in a machine.

While the plan may sound implausible and worthy of a laugh, the man behind the plan believes that this could be an effective method in tacking pollution and also be more economical.

Let’s take a look at this innovative method:

Crow training in Sweden

Corvid Cleaning is the company behind this plan. The company is based in Södertälje, a city not far from the capital Stockholm. Christian Günther-Hanssen, the founder of the company, said the  method relies on the reward-based training or positive reinforcement.

Günther-Hanssen explained that the birds would will receive a little food each time they deposit a butt in a machine. Günther-Hanssen believes that the method will cut down the cost of cigarette butt cleanup in the city by 75 per cent.

Speaking to The Guardian, he said, “The estimation for the cost of picking up cigarette butts today is around 80 öre or more per cigarette butt, some say two kronor.”

“If the crows pick up cigarette butts, this would maybe be 20 öre per cigarette butt. The saving for the municipality depends on how many cigarette butts the crows pick up,” he added.

Sweden’s trash problem

Cigarettes are one of the most littered items on Earth, as well as one of the most dangerous forms of litter. Many people are under the false impression that cigarettes are biodegradable. However, cigarette butts are actually primarily plastic; they contain toxic chemicals that can pollute the environment.

In Sweden, more than 1 billion cigarette butts are tossed on the streets each year and make up 62 per cent of the country’s litter, according to The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation.

The city of Södertälje alone spends 20 million Swedish kronor, over $2 million, on street cleaning.

 

Why crows?

When asked why the method was dependent on crows, Günther-Hanssen said that they are easier to teach.

Moreover, he added that there is also a higher chance of them learning from each other and a lower risk of them mistakenly eating any rubbish.

There was also a 2014 study that said that crows showed reasoning skills equivalent to a 7- to 10-year-old human child, giving them a higher chance of successfully handling the complex tasks of seeking out littered cigarettes, dropping them off to a specific machine and receiving food as their reward.

As per the BBC, crows are arguably one of the smartest creatures in the animal kingdom: They can also make hooked tools out of wires or twigs, problem solve and send each other messages with body gestures.

Not the first time

This is not the first time that crows have been used to keep the streets clean. In 2018, six crows were specially trained to pick up cigarette ends and rubbish at a French historical theme park.

Nicolas de Villiers, the head of the Puy du Fou theme park, told AFP news agency that it was not just about keeping the area clean. “The goal is not just to clear up, because the visitors are generally careful to keep things clean”.

It was also about showing “that nature itself can teach us to take care of the environment”, he added.

With inputs from agencies

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