Clever solution: Crows are cleaning city streets – a Dutch startup is training them to pick up cigarette butts in exchange for treats

( Natural News ) A new Dutch startup called “Crowded Cities” is training crows to recognize and pick up cigarette butts in exchange for treats , effectively cleaning up the city streets and parks. The crows would drop the cigarette butts into a “Crowbar” device, which then scans the piece of litter to confirm that it is a cigarette butt. Once confirmed, the device gives the crow a food reward, reinforcing the behavior. The inception of the bizarre project was inspired by a fateful meeting of project founders—interaction designer Ruben van der Vleuten, and experiment designer Bob Spikman – with a man named Joshua Klein, who was teaching crows to collect coins. The Crowbar is the device developed by “Crowded Cities” designed to train crows to pick up and deposit cigarette butts. A crow drops a cigarette filter onto the device’s funnel, where a camera scans it. After the camera recognizes the item as a filter, it releases a piece of food for the crow to pick up as a reward. The crow then flies off to find more cigarette butts and recruit more crows to participate. About 4.5 trillion cigarettes are littered each year around the globe. Discarded cigarette butts are a form of non-biodegradable litter, according to a study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health . During rainfall, these litter are carried off from the streets to the drains, rivers, and the oceans. Aquatic life then come across these trash and mistake the highly toxic matter for food. There have also been instances of children swallowing them. Get more news like this without being censored : Get the Natural News app for your mobile devices. Enjoy uncensored news, lab test results, videos, podcasts and more. Bypass all the unfair censorship by Google, […]

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