Butts On the Ground

Humans smoke about six trillion cigarettes every year and then toss 4.5 trillion butts onto the ground. Since filters are made mostly of plastic, this toxic churning of trash adds up to a toxic problem.

A pilot project in Sweden is outsourcing the cleanup job to an unexpected group: crows. In the municipality of Södertälje, population 100,000, a startup called Corvid Cleaning is training crows to pick up cig butts and deposit them into a waste receptacle in exchange for a treat.

Happily, the crows are not being forced into servitude. “They are wild birds taking part on a voluntary basis,” Christian Gunther-Hanssen, founder of Corvid Cleaning, told TT News Agency.

Why crows? “They are easier to teach and there is also a higher chance of them learning from each other,” Gunther-Hanssen says. “At the same time, there’s a lower risk of them mistakenly eating any rubbish.”

The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation estimates that over a billion cigarette butts are dropped on Sweden’s streets every year (who counts these things?), representing 62 percent of all litter.

Watch the corvid cleaners here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TklOxbWfRDM.

Photo credit: Daily Mail