Specially funded chewing gum removal project completed

The grant of £27,045 from the Chewing Gum Task Force has been used over the last few months to target some of the worst areas affected by chewing gum thoughtlessly discarded as part of South Lanarkshire's It's Your Place campaign.

Councillor Robert Brown, the chair of the council's Community and Enterprise Resources Committee, said: "For a third year running the council successfully secured funding specifically to remove chewing gum from our streets and open spaces.

"Part of the council's ongoing It's Your Place campaign, removing chewing gum is part of the overall campaign to tackle litter and other anti-social behaviours that make many areas within our communities unsightly and unattractive places for people to live and work in.

"As well as using the funding to remove the gum, the funding also allowed us to target behaviour through special 'bin your gum' stickers that were placed prominently on street bins in the worst affected areas."

The council is one of 54 across the country that have successfully applied to the third annual round of grants administered by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy and funded by major gum manufacturers including Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van Melle.

Allison Ogden-Newton OBE, Chief Executive of Keep Britain Tidy, said: "Thankfully the majority of people who chew gum dispose of it responsibly. But for those who don't, cleaning gum and the resulting staining it causes off our pavements costs councils millions of pounds every year."

Monitoring and evaluation carried out by Behaviour Change - a not-for-profit social enterprise - has shown a reduced rate of gum littering six months after the clean-up and prevention signage materials were put up in the areas affected.