Mayor urges chewing gum clean up ahead of 2012

The Mayor of London today (Friday 9 July) rallied London to tackle the problem of chewing gum litter in the lead up the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The Mayor hosted a City Hall summit bringing together chewing gum manufacturers, disposal and clean-up experts, borough councils and other key organisations. The summit explored solutions to remove chewing gum from our streets and how to change people's behaviour and stop them dropping gum in the first place. They also discussed the latest innovative technologies on the market, for example a scheme by Gumdrop to recycle old chewing gum into plastic bins for discarded gum.

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson said: ‘Gum detritus casts an unsightly stain on our beautiful city and scraping it off our streets is also a great drain on taxpayers ' money. I want visitors in 2012 to be welcomed to a sparkling clean capital, not be greeted by the sight of chewing gum blighted streets.’

The Mayor has pledged to reduce litter in the capital in the run up to the 2012 Games. In the coming months there will be a litter summit with the Campaign for Protection for Rural England, London Councils and Keep Britain Tidy, work to improve access to litter bins on the London Underground network and we are currently talking to the boroughs about a scheme to make it easier for Londoners to report flytipping in their areas. In the spring we will also arrange London clean up campaigns

Chewing gum facts: 

• The cost of cleaning up London’s streets from chewing gum is estimated as being as much as £10 million every year.
• Chewing gum takes up to five years to degrade.
• The cost of removing each bit of chewing gum is between 50p-£2.
• Deep cleaning the entire length of Oxford Street to remove chewing gum takes three months and during this process over 300,000 individual pieces of chewing gum are removed from the pavement ( New West End Company).
• In the annual London survey, when asked to list two to three priorities for improving the quality of the environment, 20 per cent of Londoners surveyed gave litter as a priority.

ENDS

Notes to editors

1. Case studies 

Croydon business improvement district 
Croydon is one of the biggest retail centres outside central London and in 2007-8 removed over 4 million pieces of chewing gum. They ran a specific campaign targeting chewing gum litter, they added chewing gum litter bins, offered local businesses the opportunity to buy litter bins at reduced price and this saw a 38 per cent reduction in chewing gum litter.

New West End Company 
Their Clean Team initiative wash and blow dry over 3000 miles of pavement every year. Even with these resources, deep cleaning the entire length of Oxford Street takes three months. In this short time, 300,000 individual pieces of chewing gum are removed from the pavement. It invests £1.2 million a year in this mammoth task, above and beyond the work undertaken by Westminster City Council, and since its inception in 2005 has collected over 250kg of chewing gum.

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