Not Quite A Bird Brain - Corvids Can Clean Up Our Mess!

There are lots of clever animals out there and in fact the task of even trying to define whether an animal is intelligent or not is a difficult process in of itself. But I’m sure you all know and will agree that the 126 species which are found within the Corvidae family all exhibits some form of intelligence. 

Corvidae’s or corvids for short are a family of birds in which you can find species such as crows, ravens and jays. As a family they can be found across the world on every continent apart from Antarctica and many of them regularly perform tasks which can be construed as intelligent. This intelligence can be attributed to the fact that some species of crows possess a brain to body weight ratio equal to that of great apes, whales, dolphins and porpoises. As a family they do range in size and colour with the smallest weighing only 41g and the heaviest being the thick-billed raven sometimes exceeding 1400g. They are non-migratory however some populations have been known to temporary relocate to other regions where the conditions are better, a behaviour which is usually driven by food shortage.  

Now there is a reason I have chosen to write about corvids today as I have heard about a Dutch start-up company which have come up with an environment idea using crows. Their idea is to use crows to pick up the billions of cigarette butts which are thrown onto the ground each year. This is a real problem as in 2016, 258 billion cigarettes were produced in the USA alone, now while some of these would have been disposed of responsibly many would have simply been dropped. Add this to the fact that it takes 18months – 10 years to degrade depending on the environmental conditions they become a huge problem.

The Start-up plans to release trained crows which have learnt to bring these butts and other small bits of rubbish to a special station where it would then be weighed and scanned and dropped into a collection pot whilst some food would be released for the bird. This is an idea which has already been proven to work. Also the beauty of it is that hopefully by releasing a few birds which have been trained to litter pick others will observe this behaviour and then copy in order to benefit from the free food.

There are people who question whether we should be using animals to collect our rubbish. This is understandable as it will affect their natural behaviour stopping them from foraging in the ‘natural’ method. Saying this however corvids have been observed using bread crumbs to catch fish and dropping nuts and other food items into roads so they are easily broken open by vehicles, so when you look at these events you can see that humans are already affecting corvids behaviour. There is also another issue with the fact that the cigarette butts could be easily ingested and then kill the birds. So I’ll let you decide what you think but I think that this is a good idea.

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Plastic In The News - Your Coffee Is About To Get Even More Expensive

So I’m still going on about plastic at the minute but that’s only because of what’s been happening in the news over the last week or so.

First of all an announcement from China has stated that it will no longer be importing plastics from other countries to recycle. This is serious as currently China is importing and recycling around 500,000 tonnes of UK plastic waste annually, and we’re not the only country to send our waste there. As in 2016 alone China processed 7.3 million tonnes of plastic which is over half the total amount recycled globally in 2016.

This new import ban is understandable as China as an industrial country is heavily polluted and although a large amount of business was conducted thanks to the importation then breaking down and recycling of plastics. So not only will foreign

exports such as the UK suffer and have to look for other countries such as Malaysia or Vietnam to take in and process their waste or deal with it themselves, so of the Chinese population will have to undergo changes as their source of income adapt. But I think it is right as if China wishes to ban plastic imports as it shows that they wish for their country to develop and are taking environmental factors into consideration.

As well as this news the UK ministers have also brought up today that they wish to impose a 25p “latte levy” per disposable coffee cup used in the UK. This is thought to be widely welcomed by many as currently the UK throws away 2.5 billion coffee cups a year.

This is mainly due to the fact of their composition as they are cardboard with an plastic lining to waterproof the container. This is effective and cheap to produce but it does make them extremely difficult to recycle as these elements have to be separated. As of this moment there are only two processing plants in the UK capable to undertake this process which limits the amounts which can be recycled.

Ministers have said that they hope that this new levy will help to encourage people to make use of reusable cups instead of the one use items.

Disposable cups also help bring up the fact that some commonly used products are extremely difficult to break down to recycle. Such as Pringle cans, those trays used in food packaging and Lucozade sport bottles all because they are made up of several different core components.

Hopefully these announcements will have the desired effects.

Thanks for reading! 

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