Swedish startup uses crows for cleaning up areas of the city. The bird is used to collect cigarette bits. The Guardian reported.
The startup called Corvid Cleaning in Södertälje, near Stockholm, is training the birds to pick up the discarded butts and bring them to a machine in return for a little food, according to The Guardian.
“They are wild birds taking part on a voluntary basis,” said Christian Günther-Hanssen, the founder of Corvid Cleaning, told The Guardian.
The company thinks that it will help clean about 75% of the discarded butts found around Södertälje, The Hill reported.
The Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation says that more than one billion cigarette butts are left on Sweden’s streets each year and represent 62% of all litter in the country.
Södertälje spends 20m Swedish kronor (just over $2 million) on street-cleaning each year, The Guardian said.
The Hill stated that although cigarettes butts can take as long as 10 years to completely decompose, the chemicals they emit during the process, such arsenic and lead, can remain in the environment for longer periods of time and pollute the environment if they are ingested into soil or water.