Louise Sallé 12:26 p.m., February 21, 2022

The company "Birds for change", born in Marseille two years ago, is about to market a very ingenious device.

This is a smart bin that rewards crows, magpies and crows who deposit cigarette ends, cans, bits of plastic or greasy paper collected from the street on a platform.

In Sweden, crows are trained to pick up cigarette butts in the streets of Stockholm.

In France, a start-up from Marseille is preparing to launch an ingenious new tool to achieve the same objective.

The company called "Birds for change" uses ravens, crows and magpies to collect waste!

The start-up makes smart bins that attract crows, and teaches them to pick up cans, plastic and cigarette butts.

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Devices were already installed in November, in the Paris region in Aubervilliers, in the park surrounding the offices of the Icade group.

And communities are interested in the project.

At the start of the school year in September, three of the largest cities in France (Paris, Lyon and Marseille) should install some of these bins in their streets.

Birds with a very high intelligence

If crows, magpies and crows were chosen to do this work, it is because these birds are endowed with a very high intelligence.

Each time they drop waste on the trash can platform, they get a kibble.

And therefore understand that you have to start over to be rewarded again.

"Until now, the experiments only made it possible to teach birds to collect metal waste", explains Jules Mollaret, co-founder of the company at the microphone of Europe 1. "But the waste that we find, it's mostly plastic, it's the scourge of our generation, so we needed a technology capable of identifying pieces of plastic brought back by a bird. And we managed to do it thanks to artificial intelligence", details- he.

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"If the birds can do it, why can't we?"

Each corvid can pick up about thirty pieces of waste per day.

But keep in mind that any human could do this job in five minutes.

The objective of "Birds for change" is therefore to make people aware of taking care of their environment.

"Our slogan is 'If the birds can do it, why not us?'", adds Jules Mollaret.

"In fact, we use this electroshock side. We want people to say to themselves: 'It's easier to teach birds to pick up waste, than to teach human beings!'', insists the co-founder of the Marseille start-up.

Jules Mollaret to continue: "Our goal is to point the finger at this aberration, to talk about the subject with new methods, it is our big priority", he concludes.

In France, nearly a million tons of garbage end up outside the bins each year, including no less than 30 billion cigarette butts.