• Council awarded second grant from Chewing Gum Task Force
• Last year’s grant has helped deliver an 80% reduction in gum litter
Newham Council is one of 56 councils to be awarded additional funding from The Chewing Gum Task Force grant scheme; a fund focused on cleaning up chewing gum from the UK’s towns and cities.
With support from The Chewing Gum Task Force established by Defra and run by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy, Newham Council stands by their pledge to make neighbourhoods cleaner, reduce gum litter in local areas and invest in long term behaviour change.
Now in its second year, the funding worth up to £1.2 million from major gum manufacturers including Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van Melle, will support local councils in purchasing equipment to carry out deep cleaning to remove chewing gum stains from streets; and install new signage to encourage people to bin their gum in future.
Monitoring and evaluation carried out by Behaviour Change has shown that last year Newham Council benefitted from a reduction in gum littering of up to 80% within the first two months, whilst prevention materials saw less gum litter observed six months after clean-ups.
Councillor James Asser, Cabinet Member for Environment and Sustainable Transport said:“After the success of the first round of funding, we are once again delighted to work with The Chewing Gum Task Force, who are supporting us in tackling the ongoing problem of litter”.
“Our residents made it clear that chewing gum litter blights our streets and that they want to see a cleaner, smarter borough.
“Thanks to the fund, we’ll receive further support to clean up our high streets and public spaces. Our enforcement team are busy tackling day-to-day litter and will continue to issue fixed penalty notices of £150 to anyone who drops gum on our streets.
“It costs money to clean up gum, money which could be spend on other services to residents, so fines and new signage will allow us to discourage people from dropping gum in the first place.”
Around 77% of England’s streets are stained with gum, according to Keep Britain Tidy, and the estimated costs to councils is around £7million each year. The Chewing Gum Task Force grant fund represents a commitment from the Government and major gum manufacturers to work together to find long-term solutions to this issue.
The grant of £25,000 has been awarded to London Borough of Newham for Year 2 of the Chewing Gum Award.