| Got some gum chum? |
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| Written by Over the Garden Wall | |
Those pavements that are cleaned up.......Chewing gum, the disgusting stuff that stains our pavements.
Those pavements that are cleaned up - at a cost of up to £250,000 for a small city centre - might be steamed, scraped, lasered or doused with chemicals to get rid of the stuff. According to the Keep Britain Tidy campaign, councils in England alone spent £8.5m in 2005 cleaning up gum. The House of Lords is currently debating whether to tax gum to help pay for the clean up. Not a bad idea when you look at the state of Huddersfield’s pavements, shall we say 50p a pack to start with? OTGW.
Additional information & resources Now help is at hand. The University of Manchester is working with Green Biologics, an Oxford based biotechnology company, to develop a revolutionary biological treatment that is cost effective, non-toxic and environmentally friendly. Clean up is difficult, time consuming and costly. Currently about £150 million are spent annually by local authorities in the UK on chewing gum removal. Currently available products rely on abrasive chemicals, high-pressure washing and/or physical scraping. Most treatments are not particularly effective and can cause environmental damage. But this new treatment uses natural enzymes to break down the chemical structure of gum and Green Biologics been awarded a grant from the DTI to help develop a prototype in collaboration with researchers from the University of Manchester. Dr Gill Stephens from the University's School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science said: 'The new treatment will make it much easier to clean up waste chewing gum. Enzymes are nature's own catalysts, and are, therefore, safe and environmentally friendly. They work at low temperatures and pressures, so the biological treatment is much less harsh and damaging than the existing clean up methods' Dr Edward Green, Managing Director of Green Biologics commented 'This new funding will permit further development of this exciting product. We have teamed up with scientists specialising in biological methods for chemical degradation to tackle not only problems with gum but also other environmental nuisances such as graffiti. The public will benefit from our technology which will result in a cleaner built environment.' |
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