British designer Anna Bullus is on a mission to recycle chewing gum into useful objects, cleaning up our streets in the process.

More than £14bn is spent on chewing gum around the world each year, but a lot of that gum will end up stuck to the ground. 

Gum is the second most common type of street litter after cigarette materials.  In the UK, councils spend around £50m each year cleaning up the mess.

But Anna had an idea. What if the sticky stuff could actually be recycled and turned into useful objects?

Around 10 years ago, she began a project looking at kerbside litter. She examined random samples, looking at things like crisp packets and cigarette butts. She then tried to figure out which elements could be recycled.

"One of the litters I found was a piece of chewing gum and as a designer I was completely amazed there was nothing actually being done to recycle it," she said.

Researching the chemistry of chewing gum, she discovered that its main ingredient, the gum base, is commonly a synthetic rubber, a type of polymer similar to plastic.

"It’s called polyisobutylene," explains Anna, "the same stuff you find in the inner tube of bicycle wheels."
It is obtained from petrochemicals, which are refined from fossil fuels like crude oil.

She realised that chewing gum, even once it has been finished with, is a versatile and potentially useful material.

Collecting Gum
But how do you persuade people to donate their gum – instead of carelessly tossing it on to the street?

As part of her strategy, Anna created bright pink, bubble-shaped bins specially for disposing of gum called Gumdrop, which can be hung at head-height. 

These bins are themselves made of recycled chewing gum. A message next to the bins explains that any gum collected will be recycled into new objects.

But would gum-chewers use them?

The University of Winchester was one of the first places to sign up to use the bins. Around 8,000 people live and work on its campus and the authorities wanted to keep it clean of gum litter.

It adopted a twin-pronged strategy to tackle the problem.

It installed 11 of Anna’s special bins and to reinforce the message that gum can be recycled if disposed of responsibly, it gave out hundreds of coffee cups made of recycled gum to first-year students.

"Students would give the cup a sniff to check it didn’t smell of mint or bubble gum," recalls Liz Harris, the university’s environmental officer.

"It’s because so much of the chewing gum sold on the high street is a polymer [so it] can be used to make new products.  ‘When people get it, it’s a really nice moment." 

Eighteen months later, the university noticed a drop in gum litter and is expanding the scheme.

To read the full story, visit http://www.bbc.com/news/stories-43198104.

Sponsor