Council Secures Funding to tackle Chewing Gum on Borough's Streets

A grant from the Chewing Gum Task Force, administered by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy, will help Ards and North Down reduce gum littering.

The grant of £27,500 has enabled Ards and North Down Borough Council to buy a new a pavement washing machine that will make it much easier to remove the chewing gum that blights local streets. The new machine will be deployed in the centres of Bangor, Newtownards, Comber, Holywood and Donaghadee.   

The Mayor of Ards and North Down, Councillor Gillian McCollum, said:

"We all want to live in a clean environment and for visitors to be impressed with our clean and attractive towns and villages when they visit the Borough. Any equipment that will enable us to achieve this more effectively and efficiently is good news. I would like to thank the officers involved in securing the funding and the equipment and look forward to seeing our new pavement washer in action over the summer period."

Ards and North Down is one of 52 local authorities across the UK that have successfully applied to the Chewing Gum Task Force, now in its fourth year, for funds to clean gum off pavements and prevent it from being littered again.

Established by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and run by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy, the Chewing Gum Task Force Grant Scheme is open to councils across the UK who wish to clean up gum in their local areas and invest in long-term behaviour change to prevent gum from being dropped.

The Task Force is funded by major gum manufacturers including Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van Melle, with an investment of up to £10 million spread over five years.

Monitoring and evaluation carried out by Behaviour Change - a not-for-profit social enterprise - has shown that in areas that benefitted from the first and second year of funding, a reduced rate of gum littering of up to 80% was seen in the first two months - with reductions still being observed six months after targeted street cleansing and the installation of specially designed signage to encourage people to bin their gum.

Estimates suggest the annual clean-up cost of chewing gum for councils in the UK is around £7 million and, according to Keep Britain Tidy, around 77% of England's streets and 99% 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."