Chewing Gum Task Force cleans up a football field’s worth of gum

That’s enough gum to cover the Ashton Gate Stadium pitch!

After receiving a £27,500 grant to tackle the issue earlier this year, we’ve worked with Bristol City Council to clean up gum and reduce people littering their gum. This year, environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy administered grants for 54 councils across the country that successfully applied to the Chewing Gum Task Force.

Backpacks provided through the grant use an eco-friendly sugar-based liquid heated to a high temperature to disintegrate gum stains, leaving behind spotless pavements.

Here are some of the successes from the Task Force over the past 4 months.

• 7,000 m2 of pavement cleansed by the Task Force
• 40 ‘Bin Your Gum’ stencils sprayed on pavements
• 70 behaviour changing bin stickers and signs installed around the city centre

Major gum manufacturers including Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van Mellehe fund the Task Force grants. They provide an investment of up to £10 million spread over five years.

Monitoring and evaluation carried out by Behaviour Change shows that in areas that benefitted from the first year of funding, a reduced rate of gum littering was still being observed six months after clean-up and the installation of prevention materials.

Estimates suggest the annual clean-up cost of chewing gum for councils in the UK is around £7 million. According to Keep Britain Tidy, around 77% of England’s streets and 99% of retail sites are stained with gum.

By combining targeted street cleaning with specially designed signage, participating councils last year achieved reductions in gum littering of up to 60% in the first two months.