WYRE FOREST District Council has been awarded a £27,500 grant to tackle the sticky issue of chewing gum blighting local streets.
The cash has come from the Chewing Gum Task Force, which is administered by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy.
The council is one of 52 across the country which successfully applied for funds to clean gum off pavements and prevent future littering.
Established by Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and run by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy, the Chewing Gum Task Force Grant Scheme is open to councils across the UK wishing to clean up gum in their local areas and invest in long-term behaviour change to prevent gum from being dropped in the first place.
The task force is funded by major gum manufacturers including Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van Melle, with an investment of up to £10million spread over five years.
Leading to behavioural change
Monitoring and evaluation carried out by Behaviour Change – a not-for-profit social enterprise – has shown areas which received funding in the first and second years of the scheme saw gum littering reduce by up to 80 per cent in the first two months. Further reductions were observed six months after targeted street cleaning and the installation off specially designed signs encouraging people to ‘bin their gum’.
Coun Ben Brookes, Wyre Forest District Council’s Cabinet Member for Operational Services, said: “We’re really pleased to have been awarded this funding – nobody likes seeing gum stuck all over our streets.
“This grant means we can get to work cleaning it up and, just as importantly, help remind people to bin their gum rather than drop it.
“It’s a small change in behaviour that makes a big difference to how our district looks and feels.”
Estimates suggest the annual clean-up of chewing gum costs councils across the UK around £7million and, according to Keep Britain Tidy, around 77 per cent of England’s streets and 99 per cent of retail sites are stained with gum.
In its third year the Task Force awarded 54 councils grants worth a total of £1.585 million, helping clean an estimated 500,000m2 of pavements.
Allison Ogden-Newton OBE, Keep Britain Tidy’s chief executive, said: “Chewing gum continues to be an unsightly form of litter in our public spaces – though thankfully the scheme is leading to significant reductions.
“People need to remember that disposing irresponsibly of their gum causes harm to our environment as it takes years to decompose naturally – and, ultimately, costs the public purse to clean it up.”
