Chewing gum costs Britain’s local authorities £150m every year to remove from the streets

COULD this be the answer to the sticky mess blighting the pavements of London?

The world's first biodegradable chewing gum is arriving on the capital’s supermarket shelves this week.

The makers of Chicza claim the organic chewing gum does not stick to clothing or pavements and will crumble into dust in about six weeks.

It has been launched by a collective of Mexican farmers and follows five years of research and development.

Because it is made entirely from rainforest plants rather than petro-chemical polymers (as in normal gum), it is being hailed as a breakthrough in the war against chewing gum, which costs Britain’s local authorities £150m every year to remove from the streets.

Westminster Council has identified discarded chewing gum as its number-one litter problem

It spends £100,000 a year removing it from pavements and estimates a comprehensive gum clean-up in the borough would cost £9m.

Danny Chalkley, cabinet member for environment and leisure at the council, said: "We certainly welcome the idea of biodegradable gum.

"Gum litter is a constant problem for us, especially given the vast number of visitors to Westminster every day.

"It's an incredibly expensive and time-consuming task, so anything that could reduce the problem is very welcome indeed."

Conventional chewing gum is difficult – and expensive – to remove because of its chemical content.

Routine street cleansing does not remove discarded gum. The most popular removal system is power washing. However, some authorities also use manual scraping, steam cleaning and freezing the gum.

It takes 17 weeks for chewing gum to be removed from the entire length of Oxford Street in London, but only 10 days for it to be littered with gum again.

Manuel Aldrete, managing director of Chicza, said: "Our 2,000 chewing gum farmers are very excited to be launching their brand-new, biodegradable and 100 per cent organic chewing gum in the United Kingdom."

Chicza comes in lime, mint and spearmint flavours, and will go on sale at Waitrose and Mexican restaurant Wahaca in Covent Garden and the Westfield Centre.

Gum facts

• Almost a billion packs of gum are bought in Britain every year

• Each piece of gum costs about 3p to buy, but between 10p and 30p to clean up

• Three-and-a-half billion pieces of gum are disposed of every year in the UK

• Nine out of 10 city paving stones have had gum stuck to them

• There are more than 300,000 blobs of chewing gum on Oxford Street alone

• More than £150m is spent each year on cleaning up gum on the UK's streets

• Singapore banned gum in 1992 because of a litter problem, but nicotine gum was allowed last year

• The Keep Britain Tidy Campaign says people in the UK consume 935 million packets of gum every year