Sefton Council Awarded £27,500 Grant to Remove Chewing Gum from Streets
Chewing gum will be cleaned off streets across Sefton after it was awarded a government grant for specialist equipment.
Hotspots across the borough
Sefton Council will remove the chewing gum that blights hotspots across the borough after receiving £27,500 to tackle the issue.
Chewing Gum Task Force
The council is one of 52 across the country that have successfully applied to the Chewing Gum Task Force, administered by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy, for funds to clean gum off pavements and help prevent it from being littered again.
Unsightly and disgusting
Cllr Peter Harvey, Cabinet Member for Cleansing and Street Scene, said:
“Gum on our streets is unsightly and disgusting. By successfully applying for this Government cash, we can tackle the issue across our communities – making Sefton cleaner and greener.
“We’re really pleased to be working in partnership with Keep Britain Tidy on this initiative.
“As a council, we share their commitment to creating a better borough for the people of Sefton as well as changing behaviours around littering.
“Thanks to their funding, we’ll be tackling several hotspot areas across the borough, including areas of high footfall in Bootle, Waterloo and Southport, where chewing gum litter has been a persistent issue. We also hope to change behaviour.”
Defra and Keep Britain Tidy
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 historic gum in their local areas and invest in long-term behaviour change to prevent gum from being dropped in the first place.
Gum manufacturers
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.
Behaviour Change
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.
Harm to our environment
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.”