Ards and North Down Borough Council Secures Funding to tackle Chewing Gum on Streets
There’s nothing more unsightly that chewing gum littering the pavements in a town and sticking under your feet in the hot weather.
Ards and North Down will be able to reduce gum littering as they have received a grant from the Chewing Gum Task Force, administered by the environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy. It will help 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.xa0xa0xa0
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.”
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The Chewing Gum Task Force:xa0The Chewing Gum Task Force brings together some of the UK’s major chewing gum producers (Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van Melle) in a partnership to remove gum litter from UK high streets and prevent future littering.
The scheme, administered by independent charity Keep Britain Tidy, sees the chewing gum firms invest up to £10 million over five years to achieve two objectives; cleaning up historic gum staining and changing behaviour so that more people bin their gum.xa0
Behaviour Change:xa0www.behaviourchange.org.uk
Behaviour Change is a not-for-profit social enterprise, founded in 2009. They create social and environmental change, with big ideas grounded in behavioural science.
Through a 5-year innovation programme and collaboration with chewing gum manufacturer Mars Wrigley, they created and tested a range of ways to encourage responsible behaviour, which resulted in local reductions of gum littering by up to 64%.
These interventions have now been made available for deployment by councils as part of the Gum Task Force Grant Scheme. Intervention toolkit:xa0
Keep Britain Tidyxa0is a leading environmental charity. They set the standard for the management of parks and beaches, inspire people to be litter-free, to waste less and live more sustainably.
They run campaigns and programmes including the Great British Spring Clean, Eco-Schools, Love Parks Week, Buy Nothing New Month, Eco-Schools, the Green Flag Award for parks and green spaces, the Blue Flag/ Seaside Awards for beaches and blue spaces, and the Green Key for sustainable tourism and hospitality.
To find out more about Keep Britain Tidy, their campaigns and programmes visit:
