Mid Ulster awarded additional funding to tackle the sticky issue of chewing gum
A fourth grant from the Chewing Gum Task Force, administered by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy, will help Mid Ulster District Council continue to clean up gum and reduce gum littering.
Mid Ulster District Council is continuing to remove the chewing gum that blights local streets after receiving an additional £27,500 grant to tackle the issue.
This funding from the Chewing Gum Task Force, now in its fourth year, will be used to clean gum off pavements and prevent them from being littered again. Mid Ulster District Council is one of 52 across the country that have successfully applied to the Chewing Gum Task Force and is one of only three local councils to successfully secure the funding for a fourth year.
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 who wish 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 £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.
Chair of the Council, Councillor Frances Burton is delighted the Council was successful in securing the funding for a fourth year. She said:
We spend almost £2.4M on street cleaning every year, which includes the removal of unsightly chewing gum from our local footpaths and streets. I would like to remind people that chewing gum should never be discarded on the ground. However, it is wonderful that the Council was again successful in its grant application to the task force for a fourth year in a row, bringing the total funding received to date to £100,000. This additional funding will help us maintain the cleanliness of our towns across Mid Ulster that have been affected by this unsightly and avoidable issue.
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.”