Cllr Mary Mears operates the equipment

Brighton & Hove’s streets could soon be virtually gum-free after the city council unveiled its latest weapon in the battle against street dirt and grime.

The state-of-the art device will clear up to 100,000 pieces of gum a day from the city’s streets, while using only 3 per cent of the water used by other gum-busting machines.

Mary Mears, leader of Brighton & Hove City Council, said:
"I’m declaring war on the dreadful blight of chewing gum discarded on our city’s streets. I want visitors to Brighton & Hove to be greeted by sparkling clean pavements, not by the unpleasant sight of sticky gum stains.

"By investing in this machine, we hope to rescue our beautiful urban landscape from this menace. But we also need residents and visitors to help by putting chewing gum in the bin rather than throwing it on the ground."

The machine, which is being supplied by specialist cleansing firm Gum Clear, costs £90,000. It will clear around 200 metres of pavements an hour, lifting anything from up to 50 gobs of gum a metre.

The machine is a vast improvement on older technologies because it sucks up and recycles 97 per cent of the water it uses. Earlier machines would blast water onto the pavements with high-pressure pumps, often spraying dirt onto shop fronts and blocking drains.

Councils pay up to £3,000 a day when they employ contractors to clear gum, usually treating around 2,500 metres of pavements each time. Doing this job in-house could reduce Brighton & Hove City Council’s costs to just £400 a day, making savings of thousands over the coming months and enabling far more cleaning.

The council will also look to recoup the initial costs by hiring out the machine.

The chewing gum industry is worth £300 million a year, yet Brighton and Hove has been saddled with a yearly bill of around £25,000 cleaning up the mess.

Contractors in Brighton and Hove were cleaning up to 2.2 million pieces of gum a year, covering more than 48,000 sqm of pavement.

Chewing gum facts:

- Around 9,000 tonnes of chewing gum a year - or 980m packs - are bought by 19 million people in Britain every year.

- About 80 per cent of this is simply dumped in public places.

- Some of this attaches itself to pedestrians but most just sticks to pavements.

- Gum takes up to five years to degrade, and it can be removed only with specifically designed equipment.

- It is thought to cost around 3p per piece to manufacture but around 10p per piece to clean off the streets.

For more information about Brighton and Hove Council view:
www.brighton-hove.gov.uk