The Swedish city of Malmö takes dirty talk to a new level in its latest effort to clean up litter from the streets.

With the installation of talking garbage cans that emit risqué audio messages after the garbage is dumped, the authorities hope that the number of waste that is deposited will increase.

Pedestrians who throw their rubbish into one of the two bins on the city’s Davidshallsbron bridge are rewarded with a highly positive message from a sultry female voice, offering a range of responses.

“Ah, right there, yes!”, “Come back soon and do it again!” and “Hmm, a little more to the left next time” are some of the scheduled messages.

Although the seductive approach is a new tactic, talking garbage cans are nothing new in Sweden’s third-largest city. In 2017, the city council bought 18 talking cubes, although today only two are still playing, according to Citizen Free Press affiliate Expressen.

During the pandemic, depositors were thanked for adhering to social distancing rules, but a new era calls for a new approach, says the section chief of the city’s highway department.

“The phrases are part of the campaign’s intention to get more people talking about the dirtiest thing there is: throwing away rubbish,” Marie Persson was quoted as saying by The Local, citing Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan.

“So please go ahead and feed the bins with more trash…yeah, that’s it.”

Malmö has long been known as a pioneer of green living, so its latest innovation may not come as a surprise. The city’s ecological drive is embodied in “Bo01 – City of Tomorrow”, a project started in 2001 that has transformed a disused and polluted shipyard in the city into a green and sustainable neighbourhood. All the energy needs of homes, shops and office buildings in the area are covered by renewable sources, and food waste is converted into biogas to run local buses.

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