This start-up is “recruiting” crows to pick up cigarette butts — and saving millions in clean-up costs

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In a groundbreaking effort to tackle urban litter, a Swedish start-up has launched a pilot project that sounds almost too unusual to be true: training wild crows to pick up cigarette butts from the streets. And surprisingly, it’s working, with the potential to save the city millions in cleaning expenses.

Meet the ‘Corvid Cleaning’ Project

The initiative, developed by the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation, taps into the remarkable intelligence of crows, birds known for solving puzzles, using tools, and even recognizing human faces. Under the project, crows voluntarily participate in exchanging trash for food.

A specially designed machine identifies cigarette butts dropped by a crow. If the item is litter, the machine dispenses a small food reward.

Inventor and project lead Christian Günther-Hanssen says the birds are not being forced or controlled. Instead, “they are participating on their own terms, because the reward system makes sense to them.”

Why Cigarette Butts? The World’s Most Common Plastic Waste

Cigarette butts may look small, but they are one of the biggest offenders in global littering:

• 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are discarded worldwide each year
• Filters contain microplastics and toxic chemicals
• They are the most frequently found item in street and beach clean-ups

If the crow-led clean-up continues to show strong results, researchers estimate that Sweden could reduce litter-cleaning costs by up to 75% every year.

According to Günther-Hanssen, crows are ideal partners for this work because:

• They learn new tasks quickly
• They adapt easily to urban environments
• They operate individually, reducing training costs
• They naturally pick up objects out of curiosity

Could This Become a Global Eco-Solution?

The success of the pilot has already sparked international curiosity. If scaled, the model could be adopted by other cities battling cigarette litter, offering a smart, eco-friendly and cost-effective alternative to traditional clean-up systems.

Environmental experts say the project also opens up a deeper conversation: Can wildlife and humans collaborate in solving everyday sustainability problems?

For now, Sweden’s “crow squad” is proving that innovation does not always require robots, drones, or expensive tech.

Sometimes, nature already has the perfect team, we just need to train it right.