Funding boost to tackle chewing gum blighting city streets
Nation.Cymru staff
A council has secured thousands of pounds in funding to remove chewing gum from its streets and stop it becoming embedded in pavements.
Cardiff Council has been awarded £27,500 by the Chewing Gum Task Force, administered by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy, to support a programme of street cleaning and prevention measures.
The funding will be used to buy specialist pavement sealant, spraying equipment and protective clothing for staff, as well as contributing towards the cost of carrying out the work.
The sealant creates a protective layer on pavements, making it more difficult for chewing gum to stick and easier for street cleansing teams and road sweepers to remove.
Cardiff is one of 50 local authorities across the UK to receive funding from the Chewing Gum Task Force this year. The scheme, now in its fifth year, supports councils in cleaning gum from streets while also encouraging people to dispose of it responsibly.
Councillor Ed Stubbs, Cardiff Council’s cabinet member for frontline services, said: “Chewing gum litter is a persistent issue that affects the appearance of our streets and can be costly and very difficult to remove.
“This funding will allow us to take practical action to tackle the problem while making it easier for our street cleansing crews to keep our pavements clean and tidy.
“While we are grateful to the Chewing Gum Task Force and Keep Britain Tidy for the grant funding, we would like to remind the public that we wouldn’t have an issue with chewing gum on our streets if people disposed of their gum responsibly using the litter bins provided.”
Allison Ogden-Newton, chief executive of Keep Britain Tidy, said chewing gum litter remained a “stubborn eyesore” but said the scheme was helping councils improve the appearance of public spaces.
She added that gum can take years to break down naturally and urged people to dispose of it in litter bins rather than dropping it on the pavement.
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Ultimately this is an issue purely down to companies selling products not caring about post-consumption human behaviour which can only be dealt with by legislation. Some ways to deal with this are to mandate that chewing gum needs to be individually paper wrapped so that users have something to wrap it in when it is finished with to bin it in which makes it far less likely to stick to other things in the bin, add a 5p surcharge when gum is purchased which can be distributed to councils to assist with street cleaning, or simply ban it altogether given… Read more »
Just ban gum as is the case in Singapore.The cleanest City in the World
Maybe a government campaign to say its bad for upkeep and say what is in it, plastic and talc with a flavouring, then there are the micro plastics entering your body. For ever.