The Municipality Invested Hundreds of Thousands of Kronor in a Giant Cigarette Butt – Now the Experiment Sits in Storage

300,000 kronor of taxpayers’ money went to a three-meter-tall cigarette butt at Möllevångstorget. With sensors and smoke signals, Malmö residents were supposed to be nudged to dispose of their cigarette butts in the correct place. Now, the attention-grabbing installation is in storage, waiting for the municipality to bring it out again when, hopefully, curiosity returns.

The City of Malmö presented the project in the fall of 2025 as a world-unique solution to the problem of cigarette butts on the city’s streets. The three-meter-tall blue giant cigarette butt was equipped with an ashtray and sensors that emitted a smoke signal when someone extinguished their cigarette in the right place.

The initiative was rooted in the municipality’s interest in so-called behavioral design or nudging. The idea is that, through how the public environment is designed, people are guided toward the behavior the municipality deems desirable.

Before launching the project, the City of Malmö produced a report together with the Nordic Behaviour Group. The report highlighted factors such as visibility, social norms, and proximity as drivers that may influence people’s behavior. The giant cigarette butt aimed to put these theories into practice: when someone disposes of their cigarette correctly, the smoke signal is visible, and other smokers are expected to follow suit.

The price tag for the experiment was 300,000 kronor. This meant Malmö residents paid a significant sum for the city to test whether a gigantic cigarette butt could get people to stop throwing butts on the ground.

The municipality states that the experiment did produce results. According to the assessment Malmö refers to, more butts ended up in the monument and other ashtrays during the period compared to before.

Meant to Create Curiosity

But despite this, the expensive installation now stands in storage. It was removed in autumn and was actually supposed to return in the spring. Instead, the municipality has chosen to wait.

Lars Johansson, unit manager at Malmö’s property and street office, says the municipality wants to generate curiosity about the giant cigarette butt by keeping it out of sight for a period. When it is eventually brought out again, the hope is it will receive more attention.

Malmö’s giant cigarette butt also illustrates a larger trend within public administration, where municipalities are increasingly experimenting with behavioral design to influence how citizens act. In Malmö, this idea has taken concrete form in a three-meter-tall cigarette butt for 300,000 kronor.