The world flicks , drops , and litter over4.5 trillion cigarette buttsinto our surround each twelvemonth , making them the most plentiful case of trash on Earth . Not only is this far-flung debris pretty gross , it ’s also been record to negatively affect the environs , marine life sentence , and public wellness .
To aid give up this problem , a Dutch first - up is summoning help from the masters of the dark liberal arts : the vaporing . Crowded Citiesis influence on a projection that involves training line-shooting to pick up cigarette butts from city streets and dump them in a specialized bin , for which they are honor with food .
The team first needed to rule an animal that was well - versify in city living , so it originally dally with the idea of using pigeon , the interior decorator toldTNW . However , these city - slicker are not too cagey .
line-shooting , on the other script , are super - smart creature , on a regular basis pitted as being one of themost intelligent animalson the planet . In fact , some of their abilitiesrival that of 7 - year - oldchildren . Their sharp cognitive ability make them fantastically gifted problem solvers and relatively easy to train – idealistic for this kind of charge .
This off - the - wall idea involves education gasconade to recognize cigaret backside and drop them into a “ Crowbar ” bin . A camera and computing machine system will be used to confirm this is really a cigaret filter ( and to avow the crow is n’t trying to pull up a quick one on the humans ) . After it ’s confirm , the Crowbar will drop a piece of food onto the table in front of the crow .
“ The crow [ then ] go out telling the others , or keeps this secret to himself – we are not certain , ” the company jokes on its site .
Ruben van der Vleuten and Bob Spikman , the two mental capacity behind the task , have designed and build the Crowbar but are yet to test it out using crows . They also desire to research whether this short - condition middleman with cig rump could have an effect on the Crow ' wellness .
Their inspiration come from Joshua Klein , a US - based hacker turned enterpriser , who designed“The Crow Box” . This sleek political machine is contrive to autonomously train crows to lodge lustrous coins into a box in exchange for peanuts . Since the design is Open Source , the Dutch designers rehashed the idea and applied it to the problem of city trash .
It ’s a crazy idea , but the best ideas often are .
