Nottingham City Council has secured £27,500 in external funding to help remove chewing gum staining from city centre streets and encourage people to dispose of gum responsibly.
The funding has been awarded through the Keep Britain Tidy Chewing Gum Task Force, a national scheme established by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and administered by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy. The scheme supports councils to remove chewing gum from streets and invest in long-term behaviour change campaigns to reduce gum littering.
The council is one of 50 across the country that have successfully applied to the Chewing Gum Task Force. Since the scheme launched in 2021, more than £6.4 million has been awarded to councils across the UK, funding the cleaning of over 4.15 million square metres of pavement.
The funding will support the purchase of specialist chewing gum removal equipment, staffing costs and a targeted public awareness campaign aimed at preventing chewing gum from being dropped in the first place.
Cleaning work will take place on a number of city centre streets, including Friar Lane, Beastmarket Hill, Angel Row, Market Street, King’s Street, Queen Street, Wheeler Gate and Exchange Walk.
Alongside the cleaning programme, residents and visitors will notice new signage encouraging people to bin their gum and help keep Nottingham’s streets clean. The campaign will include highly visible stencil markings and other behavioural change materials designed to reduce littering.
Previous rounds of the programme have shown strong results, with monitoring finding gum littering reduced by up to 86% in the first two months after cleaning and behaviour change campaigns were introduced. Reductions were still being seen six months later.
Councillor Sam Lux, Executive Member for Climate, Energy and Nature at Nottingham City Council, said: “We’re so pleased to have secured this funding for Nottingham. Removing gum is hard and expensive, so this investment will be a big help.
The project will allow us to remove a lot of existing gum from our city centre streets and also prevent future gum staining with new signage encouraging the public to think twice before littering.
We are looking forward to seeing a cleaner city centre for Nottingham people, visitors and businesses.”
Allison Ogden-Newton OBE, Keep Britain Tidy’s Chief Executive, said: “While chewing gum litter remains a stubborn eyesore in our public spaces, the good news is that this scheme is already driving major improvements.
“As an environmental charity, we know that every piece of gum dropped irresponsibly damages the environment, taking years to break down naturally, while also leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for costly clean-up operations.
“Everyone in Nottingham can play a part in creating cleaner, greener streets for all by binning their gum properly.”
The specialist equipment purchased through the grant will also help support future cleansing work across the city. The project forms part of the Council’s wider commitment to maintaining clean, attractive public spaces and supporting civic pride across Nottingham.
Further details about the cleaning programme and campaign activity will be announced ahead of the launch.
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Notes to editors
The Chewing Gum Task Force: The Chewing Gum Task Force brings together some of the UK’s major chewing gum producers (Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van Melle) in a partnership to remove gum litter from UK high streets and prevent future littering. The scheme, administered by independent charity Keep Britain Tidy, sees the chewing gum firms invest up to £10 million over five years to achieve two objectives; cleaning up historic gum staining and changing behaviour so that more people bin their gum.
Behaviour Change: www.behaviourchange.org.uk
Behaviour Change is a not-for-profit social enterprise, founded in 2009. They create social and environmental change, with big ideas grounded in behavioural science. Through a 5-year innovation programme and collaboration with chewing gum manufacturer Mars Wrigley, they created and tested a range of ways to encourage responsible behaviour, which resulted in local reductions of gum littering by up to 64%. These interventions have now been made available for deployment by councils as part of the Gum Task Force Grant Scheme. Intervention toolkit: www.tacklegumlittering.co.uk
Keep Britain Tidy is a leading environmental charity. We set the standard for the management of parks and beaches, inspire people to be litter-free, to waste less and live more sustainably. We run campaigns and programmes including the Great British Spring Clean, Eco-Schools, Love Parks Week, Buy Nothing New Month, Eco-Schools, the Green Flag Award for parks and green spaces, the Blue Flag/ Seaside Awards for beaches and blue spaces, and the Green Key for sustainable tourism and hospitality. To find out more about Keep Britain Tidy, our campaigns and programmes visit www.keepbritaintidy.org.
Contact the Keep Britain Tidy press office: press@keepbritaintidy.org
Keep Britain Tidy Mobile: 07768 880016