Taxation, 'gum target' boards, a ban - with a Government decision on a possible chewing gum tax imminent, Shane Hegarty looks at other countries' attempts to address the mess
Non-sticky chewing gum: it sounds like a problem for Willy Wonka. People could pop it in their mouths and when they drop it on the ground, it won't cling to the pavement and petrify. The Department of the Environment likes the idea. Chewing gum-makers can see the benefit, although some point out that it would be quite tricky given that without its stickiness, gum wouldn't be much of a gum. Meanwhile, the world gets stickier underfoot as it tries to figure out a more immediate solution.
The Government is considering a levy on the industry, or a tax on each packet of gum, with the money raised going towards street cleaning. Chewing gum now makes up 28 per cent of all the litter on our pavements, with only cigarette butts outdoing it.
As was revealed in The Irish Times last week, chewing gum giant Wrigley has lobbied against a tax, suggesting instead a programme to alter the habits of careless chewers.
The problem of unsightly, hard-to-remove chewing gum defacing cities and towns is common to much of the world. It takes up to five years for a piece of old chewing gum to biodegrade, and billions of pieces are chewed each year. The Chinese recently scrubbed away an estimated 600,000 blobs from Tiananmen Square, with military police forced to get on their hands and knees and scrape. Elsewhere, there have been more sophisticated solutions.
In Edinburgh, prison inmates made a six-foot-high steel frame sculpture of a kneeling figure with a child on its shoulders. It was placed in the grounds of a school, where pupils are encouraged to stick their gum to it and turn it into a solid and presumably slightly minty statue. It is called Sticking Together.
Meanwhile, in 2002, Bournemouth town council began erecting "gum target" boards adorned with images nominated by the public and from which about 1,600 pieces of gum are removed each week. In London, it was calculated that there were 300,000 pieces of discarded gum on Oxford Street alone, and that it would take 17 weeks to remove them all but only 10 days for the numbers to be replenished.
We don't know how much chewing gum is on the streets of Dublin, but we do know how much it costs to clean up. Having watched the newly-unveiled granite slabs of Henry Street disappear under dirty gooey pieces of gum, Dublin City Council decided to act. At a cost of €20,000, it spent several weeks cleaning Henry Street, and since then a "gum busting" machine has been deployed three nights of every month.
Meanwhile, in an effort to prevent the build-up of gum on the gleaming new
O'Connell Street plaza, €80,000 has been spent since May to deploy a machine one night a week. Similar cleaning is being carried out on Grafton Street and the streets off it. It is painstaking, expensive work, using machines that melt the gum without damaging the paving.
"It's a Sysiphian task," says Minister for the Environment Dick Roche, who says that even a tax of five cent per packet, which would raise about €5 million a year, would not cover cleaning costs across the country.
"Dealing with it requires a lot of thought. We have to have education too, we have to make it socially unacceptable to dispose of it in the street and also to make it more convenient for people to dispose of it by providing bins."
A decision on taxation or a levy will come within the next couple of months, with the Government very well aware of how the plastic bag tax reduced plastic bag use by 90 per cent almost overnight.
A consultants' report for the Department last year recommended either a tax or a negotiated agreement between industry and the Government on strategies to tackle the waste problem. Minister Roche says he has been waiting for solid suggestions from the chewing gum industry on how to solve the problem, but feels that all they have done so far is point out the downsides of a tax.
The industry argues that the negative results of a levy could include legal problems, job losses, extra litter (because, it says, people will assume someone else is cleaning their mess) and even health problems. Surprisingly, that argument has support from the Irish Dental Association, which feels that some chewing gum can help prevent cavities and other oral problems.
An outright ban is very unlikely. Chewing gum is not sold in Dublin Airport, Aer Rianta having decided some years ago that it was too difficult to clean, but even Singapore - once famous for its chewing gum ban - has softened its attitude in recent years.
It now allows nicotine-replacement gums and certain sugar-free gums recommended by dentists. Among the complaints that led to it being banned in 1992 was that gum on the tracks was responsible for the delay of subway trains. Singapore, though, strives to be a particularly sterile place. It penalises those who fail to flush public toilets.
But while many countries grapple with the problem, few have tackled it head-on yet. The British, however, have been chewing on the matter for some time. A recent survey, commissioned at a cost of £60,000, concluded that the typical British chewer is a woman aged under 24 who lives in the north of England and who either doesn't read a newspaper or reads the Sun. It was a pretty exhaustive report.
"There is an element of cool in chewing gum," it noted with impressive cultural insight.
