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Crows may soon be Sweden’s newest litter pickers
- k__ 5y agoIf they can do this with pigeons, our cities are saved.
- Markoff 5y agoA Swedish startup is training wild crows to pick up cigarette butts and other small pieces of litter. Their method will soon be ready for testing in the city of Södertälje. The wild crows can be trained through a step-by-step learning process. The birds can learn to pick up litter by placing it in to a machine which dispenses food. “They’re wild birds taking part on a voluntary basis,” said Christian Günther-Hanssen, founder of the company behind the method, Corvid Cleaning, to Swedish newswire TT. The company chose to use crows as they are the most intelligent bird, Günther-Hanssen told TT. “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,” he said. Over a billion cigarette butts are left on Sweden’s streets each year, and they represent 62 percent of all litter, according to the Keep Sweden Tidy Foundation. Now, the method is ready for large-scale testing. A potential pilot project is being investigated in Södertälje municipality, where crows will help pick up litter. “It depends on whether we can find a place in Södertälje which will work with the food dispenser, and then if there are opportunities for financing,” Tomas Thernström, waste strategist at Södertälje municipality, told TT. Similar schemes have been trialled in other countries in the past, such as this story from 2018 about crows helping to keep a French theme park clean and tidy. Günther-Hanssen believes that the scheme could save the municipality at least 75% of costs involved with picking up cigarette butts, depending on how many the crows collect. “The estimation for the cost of picking up cigarette butts today is around 80 öre or more per cigarette butt, some say 2 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”. If the pilot project works in Södertälje municipality, the hope is that the results could end in a permanent solution which could be used in the rest of the country to complement current cleaning solutions. If it’s possible, they would like to get going this spring, Thernström said. “It would be interesting to see if this could work in other environments as well. Also from the perspective that we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground. That’s an interesting thought,” said Thernström.
- vcdimension 5y agoGlad someone is finally doing this. An interesting machine learning project might be to develop a low cost cigarette butt recognizer for use with this device: http://thecrowbox.com/ http://thecrowbox.com/
- johanneskanybal 5y ago"..we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground.." :)
- Chris2048 5y agoWe can, we have the technology, we're just not allowed to use it. a $5 wrench: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- buu700 5y agoAre you saying that you want to hit people with a wrench until they stop littering? Is there a petition I can sign?
- INTPenis 5y agoSweden recently made it illegal to throw small pieces of litter like cigs on the ground. Of course hard to enforce but now police can actually act if they see it happen and perhaps make examples of some people. 800 SEK fine for cigs, chewing gum, snus for example. I used to smoke but I always just stayed around a bin, or made sure I had one near me when I was done. It's really not hard. I'd like to see double that fine.
- ajuc 5y ago> I used to smoke but I always just stayed around a bin, or made sure I had one near me when I was done. It's really not hard. I'd like to see double that fine. The problem with that is that bins are usually where people spend a lot of time. For example bus stops or benches in a park. If you have asthma it sucks to wait for a bus when someone smokes near it.
- pastrami_panda 5y agoIn Sweden it's also not allowed to smoke near bus stations or other forms of public communication (this includes train platforms etc.).
- garblegarble 5y agoThis is a wonderful idea, but wouldn't it be simpler to increase the tax on cigarettes to pay for the cleanup that's currently an externality?
- liquid_x 5y agoThat is on it's way too (link in swedish https://tobaksfakta.se/nedskrapningsavgift-foreslas-pa-cigaretter-och-snus/ https://tobaksfakta.se/nedskrapningsavgift-foreslas-pa-cigar...)
- henvic 5y agoNo. This is a bad idea just like any other that involves taxing more for the sake of... well... anything. People would just have even another incentive to buy even more smuggled cigarettes.
- polk 5y agoSource? A quick Google suggests it does in fact work as intended https://i.redd.it/jrn155a2gf4z.png https://i.redd.it/jrn155a2gf4z.png
- Majestic121 5y agoTaxing seems to work fine on other products, even including people shopping elsewhere, for example with soda : https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=3302335 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=3302335 > We find the tax is passed through at an average rate of 97%, leading to a 34% price increase. Demand in the taxed area decreases by 46% in response to the tax. A large amount of cross-shopping to stores outside of Philadelphia offsets more than half of the reduction in sales in the city and decreases the net reduction in sales of taxed beverages to only 22%. You might be against taxing for ideological reason, or maybe you have other arguments than "it's a bad idea" and I'm open to hearing them, but so far it seems like a good idea.
- b112 5y agoIn most places cigs are already taxed. I think it is 10000% here in Canada, eg 100x the cost from the manufacturer. The logic is to pay for the additional health care. If the same is happening in Sweden, then there is already plenty of tax. But I guess more could be added.
- billsmithaustin 5y agoPrevious discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486368
- foxfluff 5y agoI hope that once the crows have cleaned up the ground, they will also attack any smokers in public and take the cigs from their hands :P
- henvic 5y agoAny chance we can jump to the second part? I'm worried about poor crows smoking.
- aurizon 5y agoWhat about rowdy crowdies(murders) of drunken crows in bars, buying booze with cash from selling the dry butts to street people....coming to Swedish town near you soon...
- perihelions 5y agoThere's actually health benefits (I'm not paid by Big Tobacco I swear): https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11952 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11952 ("City birds use cigarette butts to smoke out parasites")
- colechristensen 5y agoBasically every plant chemical (flavor, drug) that humans are interested in is a defense against pests or infections.
- foreigner 5y agoThere was a crow in Austin that used to steal car keys from picnics. It was such a nuisance they had to capture it.
- b112 5y agoHow.... strange. I have never in my life, ever, seen people leave car keys anywhere but their pocket, unless they are home. Is this normal in Texas? Maybe garb is the cause, jeans being more popular, thus a tighter fit, more desire to remove keys from pockets? I am very confused.
- mschuster91 5y ago> It would be interesting to see if this could work in other environments as well. Also from the perspective that we can teach crows to pick up cigarette butts but we can’t teach people not to throw them on the ground. Well... you can, by providing enough litter bins that people don't have to hold a cigarette butt or a dog-poo bag for half a kilometer or more. Unfortunately, since litter bins cost money to operate, most cities don't put up enough. For toilets, it's the same. Public, free-of-charge toilets are an absolute rarity... and politicians whine all the time about people just relieving themselves on the next bush.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoFucking dog poo bags. Anyone who doesn't use fully biodegradable bags (eg cornstarch) is evil. Anyone who leaves them hanging on trees deserves to have their animal taken away and be given community service cleaning up excrement. Rubbish/refuse/litter/trash though, put it in your pocket, or a shoulder bag, then dispose of it when you get home. No need to put litter bins all over the place.
- RALaBarge 5y agoI agree with most of this. The thing about litter bins, though, is that if you do put them in good spots they are effective at modifying the behavior you are against here. If you want to affect a change in behavior, you will have better success working with the flow of how we know humans interact with the environment than against it.
- Kosirich 5y ago"Anyone who doesn't use fully biodegradable bags (eg cornstarch) is evil." Care to elaborate?
- mschuster91 5y agoPut pure dog poo in a compost bin and it will degrade and dissolve into the compost. Put dog poo in a non-fully-degradable plastic bag and put it in a compost bin and it will just be the same poo in a decade.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoI found the costs interesting: "The estimation for the cost of picking up cigarette butts today is around 80 öre or more per cigarette butt, some say 2 kronor." A Krona is about a US dime, so that's saying it's somewhere between 8 and 20 cents currently per butt. Call it ten cents. Then you'd need to collect a hundred butts to make ten dollars. The majority of humans on Earth would jump at that chance (assuming sufficient density of butts).
- sveme 5y agoMaybe some deposit scheme would work. Two euros per package of cigarettes, get them back if you return your 20 cigarette butts. Bit disgusting, but I really despise all the cigarette butts even at the wildest locations.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoHard to find 100 buds in an hour. You'd need to house, feed etc the workers at first-world standards (or pay them enough) which makes up the current costs. Anything else is basically slave labor.
- thanatos519 5y agoUSA: Hold my beer.
- Someone 5y agoI expect that number is computed from the local hourly minimum wage, dividing it by the number of butts one can pick up in an hour. That indeed would be a good income for billions, if they wouldn’t have to live in Sweden to do the job. Startup idea: small drones for picking up trash, operated remotely by humans living in some poor country.
- Jeff_Brown 5y agoI love the drone idea. If the median per capita income is still what it was in 2013[1], $1.5 / hr would beat it. [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-household-income-000.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/166211/worldwide-median-househo...
- anyfactor 5y agoEven though I found these ideas to be more sensationalist than pragmatic but after watching that moneky drive that golf cat, I would say I am a believer. We have gone beyond giving direct insutructions to robots and gave them autonomous decision making abilities so, giving micro tasks and training concious animals seems equally possible.
- momenti 5y agoThese viral videos of an orangutan driving a golf cart seemed to be fake to me, possibly done with the help of a remote controller or automated steering.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoCrow-sourcing may have gone too far.
- lordnacho 5y agoA billion butts? Do 10M Swedes really average 100 butts chucked into the environment? Great idea though if it works, win-win for crows and people. Maybe we'll get articles about clever crows that import butts from neighboring areas to get paid.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoWouldn't be that clever. They only have one beak per bird, so travelling longer distances isn't worth the effort, or you'd have to pay them with more food. Crows can make these decisions and might decide there are easier ways to get food.
- Markoff 5y agoIt depends, if they could swallow them and then vomit on purpose then their capacity would be significantly increased over one beak capacity.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoBirds can't do that. Also they'd get nicotine poisoning. That would be a risk even if they used their goiter. And it would taste terrible.
- Markoff 5y agoDo they even have taste buds which would taste the difference. From what i know birds can't taste spiciness, so they can eat whatever habanero you give them.
- bayesian_horse 5y agoEvery animal has some sense of taste and smell. It's the first brain nerve in vertebrates.
- shawabawa3 5y ago
- mandmandam 5y agoIs there any good reason we can't simply mandate biodegradable cigarette filters?
- foxfluff 5y agoI don't know if such a thing is feasible to build. The other problem with cigarette filters is that they fill up with toxic chemicals. And unfortunately most "biodegradable" things still take a long time to degrade. It does not solve the littering problem, if anything it seems as though it would encourage littering? I don't want litter outside.
- mandmandam 5y agoFeasible to build? I smoked rollies with cardboard filters for a decade; each "built" myself. As for the toxic chemicals, I am also strongly in favor of mandating tobacco-only cigarettes; ones without the cancerous cocktail of additives designed to maximize addiction. That would not only take care of a massive chunk of toxic chemicals but have the very likely effect of making quitting easier for addicts. As for such a mandate "encouraging littering" - mitigating harm from littering doesn't encourage litter, that's like saying getting rid of plastic bags encourages littering of paper bags. It's such a weird point to even try and make.
- corin_ 5y agoA cardboard roach is not a filter, it's just a cigarette (or joint) holding/structural device. In the case of weed smokers, not having a filter is beneficial. Most cigarette smokers don't want to skip having an actual filter. Even most people I've known to use cardboard to smoke tobacco mixed with weed, would then use a filter when rolling a tobacco-only cigarette.
- VMG 5y agohttps://archive.is/AYqzj https://archive.is/AYqzj
- aurizon 5y agoTry chickens with cars... https://michaelhendrick.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/chickens3.jpg https://michaelhendrick.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/chickens...
- T-A 5y agoUncredited prior art from 2018: https://www.crowdedcities.com/ https://www.crowdedcities.com/
- monkeydust 5y agoA truly novel approach to labour shortage - more of this please!
- tantalor 5y agoNot sure about "labor shortage". More like "wage shortage".
- monkeydust 5y agoNot sure - feel we are heading towards full employment https://data.oecd.org/chart/6BaX https://data.oecd.org/chart/6BaX
- troymc 5y agoThe squirrels will eat all the reward food.
- INTPenis 5y agoThis is more likely than one may think. Just look at the case of Rober vs. Gus.
- peatmoss 5y agoIf the crows are expecting a treat, my hunch is they'll defend... or eat the squirrels. A couple years back I watched a small murder of crows encircle, kill, and eat a very large rat. I was amazed, but apparently this is not uncommon and smallish mammals are very much on the menu for crows, who hunt in packs.
- 1_player 5y agoThen the crows will learn to distribute free cigarettes hoping people will pick up smoking and throw empty butts on the street. See the Cobra effect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- SilasX 5y agoMore likely, crows could game it by breaking up litter into smaller pieces to get more credit for the same work, or going after easier pickings that don't count as litter and don't need to be removed (rocks, twigs). Example of dolphins doing the first trick: >> Kelly [the dolphin] has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2003/jul/03/research.sci...
- Markoff 5y agoOr they can just start stealing cigarettes and tearing butts off to get reward. Then you have to deal with crow crime.
- eCa 5y agoI would be (also) fine with them training the birds too poo on people that litter. I think that would be effective in reducing new litter. One issue is of course that you really don’t want false positives..
- Markoff 5y agoTo be fair those estimates to pick up one butt are not very fair, since they are not giving any welfare benefits like social insurance to crows, no maternity leave etc. If crows unionize and start demanding maternity leave and other benefits they should be entitled to I could see how they would become more expensive than humans considering their reproduction rate. So in the end this seems more like exploiting workers unaware of their legal rights. And let's ignore the fact they mention only crows as if magpies were not allowed to participate or are they overqualified for this position? If any crow reads this contact me at 1-800-CROWHELP to help you claim all the benefits.
- rossdavidh 5y agoYeah, but it's gig work, so no benefits but you do get flexible hours.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoIsn't there a risk of nicotine, cigarette toxins, and human origin pathogens entering the crow's digestive system from them carrying these cigarette butts around in their beaks? Also a bunch of crows eating from common food sources seems like a way to spread disease among crow populations.
- ajuc 5y agoIt's not like crows aren't already picking through human trash in big flocks.
- pavon 5y agoAgreed about the communal disease. For the toxins though, it is all about dose and I could see this program increasing that by at least an order of magnitude. No idea whether it would add up to significant levels though.
- eriksjolund 5y agoInterview in Swedish with Christian Günther-Hanssen, founder of the company: https://www.msn.com/sv-se/nyheter/news/christian-l%C3%A4r-kr%C3%A5kor-att-plocka-fimpar-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Dkr%C3%A5kor-%C3%A4r-v%C3%A4ldigt-intelligenta%E2%80%9D/vi-AATbQBf https://www.msn.com/sv-se/nyheter/news/christian-l%C3%A4r-kr... The founder says: * It takes a little over a month to train a crow to pick cigarette butts * It takes one month to train a crow not to be afraid of the big box (in total 2 1/2 months) * Other crows will learn from the first crows that have been trained
- TrainedMonkey 5y agoIs there any info on how this affects crow health? Nicotine is pretty toxic stuff, eating one cigarette will make a 20kg dog sick and LD50 is less than 10: https://portal.ct.gov/DPH/Health-Education-Management--Surveillance/Tobacco/Pets-and-Tobacco-smoke https://portal.ct.gov/DPH/Health-Education-Management--Surve...
- eriksjolund 5y agoIn the interview the founder says that the next step would be to investigate how the health of the crows is impacted from picking cigarette butts. Such negative effect should then be weighed against any positive health effect that could be achieved by adding extra nutrients to the "reward food". Malnutrition can be a problem for crows eating too much junk food (from garbage).
- jmugan 5y agoI hope it doesn't make people even more likely to throw down butts, thinking "Ah, the crows will take care of it."
- Markoff 5y agoAka the Chinese approach, everyone who visited any national park in China knows what I'm talking about (trash all around the trails, which ain't accumulating). It's actually kind of promoted behavior to leave your dirty tray in McD on table, you don't wanna cleaner to lose their job cleaning the tables, same with street sweepers.
- dzink 5y agoThis would be absolutely fantastic, especially because crows are social animals and learn from each-other's behavior (so your trained contingent would expand over time)! That said there is a small risk - if crows learn to do this second hand and don't necessarily put the buds in the box, they could start fires by dropping still lit buds that were left on concrete in the wrong, combustible, place - dry grass, paper garbage, etc.
- spcebar 5y agoIn other news, a cigarette shortage has been reported, with thousands of crows queued outside tobacconists around the nation.
- amelius 5y agoReminds me of a Hitchcock movie ... Now it is clear that those birds were trained by some AI to solve some problem.
- ris 5y agoCan't wait until the crows start stealing cigarettes out of peoples hands or mouths.
- jfengel 5y agoI wonder if they'll only pick them off of the ground, or if they'll start going after cigarettes in people's mouths. Not that I'm objecting, mind you. Just curious.
- pavon 5y agoIf the food dispensers start catching fire I guess we'll know what happened :)
- efnx 5y agoConsidering the cultural importance of crows in Nordic culture I see this as an elegant solution that fits just right. Can't wait to see what funny things happen next.
- imartin2k 5y agoThere is another Swedish guy, Hans Forsberg, who trained Eurasian Magpies (also corvid family) to pick up litter. He has lots of videos on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvmhl-E4QQ0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvmhl-E4QQ0