How to recycle chewing gum into bins!
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gumdrop bin deigned by Anna Bullus
A while ago we bought you a story about Gummy Bins.
These were designed with the chewing gum lover in mind. Did you know that 935 million packs of gum are chewed by 28 million people in the UK every year? Unfortunately, 80-90% of chewing gum ends up as litter which costs us £138 million to clear up every year.
When Solihull council trialled a Gummy Bin, they reduced chewing gum litter by 72% over a six month period.
You might remember from the story, that the collected chewing gum was recycled into drainage and construction material.
This week I came across a similar story involving designer, Anna Bullus. She has set up a company to tackle the global problem of gum litter. She has been gathering up chewing gum to create a new plastic polymer that she calls “Bullus Recycled Gum Polymer,” (or BRGP) which can then be moulded into new products. So far she is making bright pink chewing gum bins to encourage people to discard their chewing gum properly, but I hope there are other products in the pipeline.
According to her statistics, cleaning chewing gum off the streets in the UK, costs three times the price of a piece of gum! If everyone in the UK stopped irresponsibly discarding their gum on Oxford Street today, it would still take over 4 months to clean the existing gum off the street.
The GumDrop Bins are bright pink so you can’t miss them. Let me know if you see one on your travels!
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I’ve not seen one of those but have a few of the other kinds at a bus stop in Bromley, Kent. Very intuitive.
@Julie Day: Shouldn’t that be… in-chew-ative? 😉
What date is it today??
cool there is 1 in milton kyens