What To Do With USED Chewing Gum Often A Sticky Situation...Until NOW!

Mothers across the world tend to get woozy when they witness their mini-me’s chomping down on gum with wide open mouths. Likening the sight to a cow sloppily chewing on its cud, they commonly deliver incessantly stern warnings with flared nostrils for extra impact. For some reason, this consistent reinforcement is never enough to prevent a fully masticated wad of Wrigley’s from getting stuck underneath a table, glued to the bottom of a shoe or embedded into a clump of hair. This milestone event generally triggers maternal disapproval which ends up morphing into a mommy dearest firestorm made all the more indelible when scissors and a tub of Crisco are plunked down in front of the teary-eyed offender.

Moms actually have it easy, though.  Of the estimated 472 million tons of chewing gum consumed across the globe, consider the scale with which cities across the world have to deal with mouth and finger propelled discards.  In Great Britain alone, well over 3/4 of the waste found on the streets is in the form of cotton-candy-colored gum, costing millions of dollars each year to clean up. Chewing gum initially started out as a substance that was derived from the resins of spruce and sapodilla trees, making way for sweetened paraffin wax. Nowadays, however, the majority of chewing gum is created from non-biodegradable, synthetically-derived petroleum polymers and rubbers which generally have a lifespan of about 5 years per blob. Texas-based Goodyear (the famous tire maker) actually supplies Wrigley’s with the synthetic rubber base they use in their chewing gum line!!

There are a few interesting alternatives that might make gum-chewing fans pop with delight. If you are a lean-mean-greenie, you can actually recycle your chewed-up gum just by sprinkling a little table sugar on it, adding a drop or two of edible essential oils such as mint or cinnamon (available at the health food store) and popping it right back into your mouth. Hey…it’s your OWN saliva, so why should it be gross?  If that idea is utterly revolting to you, then while you’re at your local specialty foods supplier, be on the lookout for Chicza Rainforest Gum. The Consorcio Chiclero sustainably taps natural latex chicle once every eight years from the chicozapote trees of South Eastern Mexico in order to create their fully organic, biodegradable chewing gum that is able to dissolve in rain within one month. Chicza Rainforest Gum is manufactured in Mexico and currently available in Great Britain with more widespread availability on the horizon.

If you refuse to give up your commercial gum habit but like the idea of keeping your unwanted balls of goo out of the landfill, then perhaps the following images will inspire you to DIY. This unusually festive t-shirt (pictured above), priced at a whopping $116, is studded with artfully arranged gum splotches. Hopefully, artist Dan Colen used something more sterile than his mouth to summon his one-of-a-kind creations.

What do you think of Adi Meirtchak’s sculptural bubble gum chair? Is this a thing of beauty or uber-grodyness? If you chewed all of those wads yourself, would you see this creation in a different light?

The Gummy Bin collection system takes the deposits of thoughtful citizens and transforms the collected gum haul into a recycled material via an aggregate that can be used to make underlay material for running tracks and drainage pipes.

There are other companies that have followed suit with their candy-colored gum receptacles -- Anna Bullus' version makes ball-shaped containers out of a bio-resin and chewing gum blend called Gumnetic -- but none have refined the upcycling system that Gummy Bin has established.

It's hardly surprising that creative minds have figured out how to turn chewed gum into works of art but Jason Kronenwald’s efforts rise to the top of the heap. His iconic pop culture themed portraits use just two ingredients -- pre-chewed gum generously masticated by his friends and a plain old plywood backing – to convey eye catching slices of our society’s celebrity fixation. Once he softens the pre-chewed gum in water and figures out the ideal color and composition, he presses his pieces into the wood, smoothing them out by hand and adding finer details with a knife. He applies a crowning coat of epoxy resin to seal the whole deal.