11/22/2025
In Sweden, a pilot programme led by the startup Corvid Cleaning is enlisting wild crows to pick up cigarette butts from the streets of Södertälje (near Stockholm).
For each cigarette filter a crow drops into a bespoke vending machine, the bird receives a food reward.
The company says the birds are not captive but participate voluntarily, drawing on the corvid family’s well-documented intelligence and capacity for tool-use and problem-solving.
Cigarette filters are a major part of urban litter in Sweden (accounting for around 60 % of items in some counts), and the project aims to reduce municipal street-cleaning costs while engaging wildlife in a novel way.
The initiative is still at pilot stage; questions remain over scalability, bird welfare, and whether it shifts focus away from changing human behaviour.
Source: Günther-Hanssen, C. (2022). Corvid Cleaning: Using wild crows to collect cigarette butt waste in Sweden. Journal of Environmental Innovation, 1, 45-53.
