According to the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation, the cigarette butts that people rudely toss onto the street represent 62% of the country's litter. Now, a startup called Corvid Cleaning is enlisting crows to collect the butts and drop them into a special trash bin. The birds are automatically rewarded with food for each butt that they bring. Video below. Fascinating that it's apparently easier to train birds to pick up litter than train humans to stop dropping it. From Oddity Central:
"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," company founder, Christian Günther-Hanssen, said. "They're wild birds taking part on a voluntary basis."[…]
Christian Günther-Hanssen believes that the initiative could save the municipality at least 75% of the costs involved with picking up cigarette butts, depending on how hard the crows work. If it proves successful, Corvid Cleaning hopes that it will provide a permanent cleaning solution that can be implemented in other parts of the country and eventually nationwide.
