Bye Gum

On a fairly fresh-looking patch of asphalt outside Ernest Jones I count 116 disgusting little blobs of the stuff.

Outside the Sacred Heart Church on Richmond Hill it's obvious that nothing's sacred: I count 340 pieces in a two-metre area outside the right-hand side of the front door.

I'm not pretending this is accurate, mind you. Because counting chewing gum is so tortuous I'm only surprised the Americans don't use it to torment suspects at Guantanamo.

After about eight minutes my eyes start to feel funny and my brain feels like it's the shape of the Guggenheim Museum.

And you start to notice things. Like how, in some places (outside the Sacred Heart, for instance but it could literally be anywhere), there is gum on top of gum. Or how so much gum has been dropped that it starts to form grubby, blobby chains.

How long can a piece of gum last on a street? "Years," says Martin Izzard, operations director of Community Clean, the company that is currently working a six-week contract to clear the streets of Bournemouth and Boscombe town centres. "The whiter the gum, the newer it is. But some bits could have been there for four or five years," he says.

I join the contractors outside Marks & Spencer in Commercial Road at lunchtime. They've been at it since 4am. "We use a vegetable-based chemical spray and then a steam-cleaner called a Mirage," says Martin. "The spray, which is completely harmless to humans and plant life, breaks down the gum and stops it from clinging to the surface of the paving bricks. Then the steam cleaner breaks it up into little bits, like sand, and we wash it away."

Surfaces like Bournemouth's red pavias do well with this method, which is the most environmentally-friendly and water-efficient. More traditional surfaces do not.

"With substances like York Stone it leaves a greasy mark unless you clean it off properly," says Martin. And as for asphalt: "The steam cleaner melts the bitumen so you may as well lay a whole new surface."

Which brings us onto cost. The current contract is costing Bournemouth council taxpayers £20,000 and it's reckoned that each piece of gum costs around 10p to remove. Which means, roughly, that the piffling patch of pavement (around four-square metres) on which I counted 196 pieces has actually cost you £19.60 to clean up. And Bournemouth is paying for 24,000 square metres of cleaning - the size of six football pitches.

According to Martin we have around 10-20 pieces of gum per metre in this town.

In Ealing in West London they have 45-50.

But who are the disgusting people who are dropping this gum? Colloquially it's reported that gum deposits are seen to be worse after weekend evenings when heavy crowds have been out at night. But who can say, when even the councillor responsible for sorting out all this, community portfolio holder David Smith admits: "In all my years I've only ever seen one person spit out some gum."

Gum droppers can be prosecuted for littering. But you've got to catch them first. According to Martin, a new gum which biodegrades is being produced. And Wrigley's has reportedly pledged £5 million into researching the problem.

David Smith would like to see an environmental tax on the gum companies which would pay for clean-ups. After all, a billion packs of gum are sold in the UK each year and most of them to the 28 million regular chewers.

But is there really any hope when you learn that it takes 17 weeks to blast the gum from London's Oxford Street - and only 10 days for it to be covered again?

As Martin cheerfully points out: "When they banned chewing gum in Singapore, it still took 10 years for them to remove all the bits and pieces off the street."

This headline was by Fay from Poole who won the headline game on the Paul Bunker show on 2CR FM on Monday.