Phil Pascoe
Established Member
Crows soaring through the sky with cigarettes in their beaks could become a familiar sight if an idea to clean up the streets takes off.
A pair of industrial designers from Amsterdam have come up with a plan to reward the birds with food for every cigarette butt collected. Ruben van der Vleuten and Bob Spikman were inspired after walking through a park blighted by *** ends.
Three quarters of filters from the six trillion cigarettes smoked each year end up in the environment, it is estimated. That is 750,000 tonnes of toxin-leaching butts that take up to ten years to decompose.
The designers believe that litter fines fail to change people’s habits, so some of our brightest birds could be recruited to do the dirty work.
They plan to train crows to use their “Crowbar” machine by initially putting food on to a platform that is eventually replaced by butts. The idea is that crows peck around and eventually knock a butt into the machine, when they are rewarded with a snack.
Finally cigarette butts are scattered close to the machine and the crow learns to pick them up to “pay” for food. After that, the inventors believe, the scavengers will seek out the butts that are easily found in their surroundings.
Quoted verbatim from The Times.
A pair of industrial designers from Amsterdam have come up with a plan to reward the birds with food for every cigarette butt collected. Ruben van der Vleuten and Bob Spikman were inspired after walking through a park blighted by *** ends.
Three quarters of filters from the six trillion cigarettes smoked each year end up in the environment, it is estimated. That is 750,000 tonnes of toxin-leaching butts that take up to ten years to decompose.
The designers believe that litter fines fail to change people’s habits, so some of our brightest birds could be recruited to do the dirty work.
They plan to train crows to use their “Crowbar” machine by initially putting food on to a platform that is eventually replaced by butts. The idea is that crows peck around and eventually knock a butt into the machine, when they are rewarded with a snack.
Finally cigarette butts are scattered close to the machine and the crow learns to pick them up to “pay” for food. After that, the inventors believe, the scavengers will seek out the butts that are easily found in their surroundings.
Quoted verbatim from The Times.
