No This Is Not A Crow Smoking A Cigarette,

it appears as we can not train smokers to dispose of their cigarette butts,

 we should train crows to pick them up for us, a discarded butt might by itself seem insignificant, but data shows that out of the 6 trillion cigarettes we smoke every year, about two thirds end up in the environment, to put that into perspective, the roughly 4 trillion cigarette butts are enough to fill 2.5 million Olympic swimming pools,

 Crows are ranked among the most intelligent species on the planet, and their understanding of causality allows them to plan, create and use tools to achieve their goals, they can learn things by observing their surroundings, manipulate humans into helping them, and some can apparently even count, crows’ encephalization quotient (approximate intelligence level) is equal to that of chimpanzees, so they were perfect for the project envisioned by Ruben and Bob, 

 the two designers knew that they wanted to train crows to clean cities of discarded cigarette butts, but it wasn’t until they discovered the Crow Box, a project by Joshua Klein, that they realised how to go about doing it, Klein had invented a machine to autonomously train crows to pick up change from the streets and exchange it for peanuts, so if they could be trained to do that, they could definitely pick up cigarette butts as well, “What you want is that the crows associate food with butts,” Ruben van der Vleuten told TNW, to achieve this, they plan to follow a four-step process thought up and tried by Joshua Klein, the first step presents the cow with a cigarette butt and a treat, on a tray in the machine, this helps the bird associate the butt with the food, so that it comes back for more,

once they get used to how things work, the crows will start looking for cigarette butts in the wild and trade them for tasty treats at the Crow Box machine, asked if constantly picking up cigarette butts full of toxins is bad for the crows, the Dutch duo gave a very pragmatic answer: “The effect on nature is huge, and we feel that a few crows are a small price to pay. Moreover, the short contact with the butt ensures the effect is minimal. We can regulate the machine to limit the number of crows that are trained. But indeed, we still need to do extensive research on this, because if the effects are found out to be bad for crows we have to look for another solution.” of course a better solution would be to dispose of the butts properly in the first place!