What are the costs of removing chewing gum?
The average clean up of gum from a town centre costs £20K and this has to be carried out a number of times a year. In Westminster there are in excess of 300,000 wads of gum on Oxford Street between Marble Arch and Charing Cross Road. What are the laws on gum? Chewing gum is now classed as litter. Even if the act of dropping gum is seen as a littering offence, the stains made by old chewing gum on pavements are often not seen as a litter cleansing issue. As a result, adequate controls and duties do not currently exist in relation to the dropping and clean up of chewing gum. Chew on this: * Almost a billion packs of gum are bought in Britain every year * Each piece of gum costs 3p to buy but 10p to clean up. * Three and a half billion pieces of gum are disposed of every year in the UK. * Nine out of ten city paving stones have had gum stuck to them. * Getting gum off the pavement takes expensive jet sprays or chemical treatments * In London there are over 300,000 blobs of chewing gum on
