The Crows Who Clean Our Cities

I’ve always thought crows were cool. I’ve read stories online about people befriending crows and they give them gifts. One story I read years ago was a child who always fed crows at her home. The crows brought her tons of pebbles, pieces of metal, and coins they found in return. One day her and her mother went on a hike and the mother dropped her camera lens cover down the side of a cliff. She tried to get it but eventually cut her losses and went home. The next day her camera lens cover was gifted back to her from the crows.

They watch us from powerlines, from rooftops, from the edges of parking lots and we think little of them. But, in Sweden, we’ve asked them to help us clean up our mess.

Cigarette butt by cigarette butt.

A Swedish startup called Corvid Cleaning has built something truly astonishing and I would argue, pure genius, a vending-machine-style device that rewards wild crows with food whenever they deposit a cigarette butt into its slot.

And these birds, brilliant and shadow-winged, are accepting the challenge.

Before the World Wakes

Every city has a feel and a language, some speak in skyscraper silhouettes or in the rumble of subway trains surfacing for breath here and there, but many cities (especially the ones that look clean from the tenth floor of an office window) speak in cigarette butts and trash.

These little guys collect along curbs like pale fossils, huddle beneath benches, and sink between cobblestones, those tiny papered ghosts of human restlessness and habit.

In Sweden, they make up more than half of all litter. Over 62%, according to national measurements, which is slightly insane if you think about it. They’re the quiet freckles of our carelessness, forgotten in seconds, lingering for literal years.

Södertälje, a city southwest of Stockholm, spends millions of kronor each year trying to scrape them from sidewalks and streets. It’s slow, expensive, and endless work. Hands were not built for this and our attention is not persistent enough for this. Not to mention, I’d never have the patience.

But the birds see everything.

Enter the Crows

Crows are not just any birds; they solve puzzles, use tools, remember faces, recognize patterns, and they even pass knowledge down generationally, not through language but through mimicry and inheritance.

Scientists have literally compared their reasoning to that of a young child. They plan and scheme while learning.

And in the streets of Sweden, one man watched them watching us.

Christian Günther-Hanssen, founder of Corvid Cleaning, wasn’t thinking about myth or folklore or the eternal symbolism of crows perched at the edge of civilization. He was thinking economically and behaviorally. He saw a city drowning in cigarette filters and an opportunity for an unusual partnership.

If the crows were already rummaging through our debris tossed aside like they hadn’t been in our mouths at one point, why not give them a reason, and a reward, to clean up the one type of waste almost no one wants to touch?

The device is small and stands in a public square, where the boundary between human life and urban wildlife blurs. If you’ve been to one of there squares you know birds and other small mammals linger in the same areas as we do, co-mingling and its finest.

Corvid Cleaning machines have crow drop in a cigarette butt → machine dispenses peanut.

Engineering for birds is different from engineering for humans.

The machine must identify a cigarette butt instantly and reject stones, ignore leaves, deny bottle caps, and toss away all the other things that crows might try to trade.
No false rewards with this machine and no shortcuts to peanuts for the crows.

It requires precision, because birds understand patterns better than we think. If you reward a crow for dropping anything, it will drop absolutely everything it can. A hungry crow would empty the city of gravel before you finish your morning coffee. So the machine listens only for the soft click of cellulose acetate filters, the distinct signature of a butt.

And when it hears one…a single peanut.

When One Crow Teaches Another

Crows teach by watching and they learn by doing.
They teach by simply existing near one another long enough for an idea to migrate from bird to bird like one of their songs.

And this is where Corvid Cleaning becomes something bigger than just one machine, because when you teach a crow something, you aren’t teaching a bird, you’re teaching an entire species something. Soon, the knowledge of how to use these machines becomes flock-wide. It’s a type of technological literacy, a way for animals to interface with our machines in a way only we do so far.

I know this sounds like the best idea ever, but don’t forget that cigarette butts aren’t harmless trinkets.
They have nicotine, tar, microplastics, and heavy metals inside of them.
All cities fears contamination more than they let on.

The environmentalists are scared of the unintended consequences as the scientists worry: what’s absorbed, does anything remain behind on feathers, does anything enter a beak or esophagus during handling?

The founder insists that birds don’t eat the filters, they simply carry them in their determination to get a peanut.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, though. No studies show either way what’s really happening.

This experiment is beautiful in a way that makes my soul ache for nature, but beauty must be protected and questioned in equal measure. Progress needs to be held accountable to its own enthusiasm.

A part of my soul lights up a little at the thought of us asking another species to help us overcome our weaknesses. Asking for help, of course, is something I’ve always believed in. When we teach crows to pick up cigarette butts, because don’t forget, the crows aren’t the ones dropping the butts, we’re breaking the barrier of species to ask someone else for help.

We’re the species that can’t quit throwing shit away and forgetting to think about the consequences of it every step of the way. We forget what we leave behind as we continue to walk forward and into our own lives. But, we’re also the species capable of building a machine that imagines partnerships across evolutionary boundaries.

The Numbers

Time for the math, because that’s where things get good. Sweden’s cities estimate that cleaning a single cigarette butt costs them around 80 öre (about $0.09 USD). While some put the number even higher, closer to 2 kr ($0.20 USD) when labor and equipment are factored in.

A crow can do it for 20 öre, one quarter the cost. Scaled up, a city could save actual millions of dollars.

Intelligence Wants to Be Seen

I’d like to think that this experiment isn’t just about cigarettes.
For too long, we’ve assumed that our intelligence is the pinnacle, the summit of evolution’s ambition.

But intelligence comes in so many forms, shapes, and sizes it’s really limiting to only calculate one way to look at it. The octopus who solves puzzles in the dark pressure of the deep isn’t more impressive than the elephant who mourns its dead for years. What about the raven who brings gifts to the humans it trusts? Out there somewhere, there’s a crow who now cleans our cities, not because it has to, but because we offered it a reason.

And intelligence loves reason.

A puzzle worth solving and a reward worth earning is a relationship worth continuing. At it’s most basic isn’t this what we do every day? We go to work for money to trade for food and housing. This machine is feeding crows for doing a job.

This is the future I want to step into: not robots replacing us, but nature recognizing us and working together for once.

I wish the world divided by species could come together and be connected by a real purpose.

The world we’re building now is not one of dominance and subservience, but one of interdependence. Where humans don’t stand above nature, but beside it.
Maybe it’s just my PTSD talking, but I never feel happier or calmer than I do when I’m in nature or working with it. I feel more connected, more a part of something, and just more alive than ever before.

So here is the truth beneath the science, beneath the engineering, and beneath the economics: the crows aren’t just cleaning cigarette butts, they’re reminding us that intelligence is everywhere and to stop overlooking everything around us.
Problem-solving is not solely human and that the natural world, if we let it, will rise to meet us halfway.

We wait for miracles in this life, but sometimes the miracle is a crow landing beside a metal box, dropping a cigarette butt, and receiving a peanut as payment.

Sometimes the miracle is small and feathered and watches us more closely than we watch ourselves. If we’re lucky, it decides we’re actually worth helping.

The Crows Who Clean Our Cities

Before the World Wakes

Enter the Crows

When One Crow Teaches Another

The Numbers

Intelligence Wants to Be Seen

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