Remember when you were younger, and you were terrified that swallowing chewing gum would clog up your pipes? Eventually, you figured out that, while not good for you, gum would pass right through your body without doing any real harm.
The same cannot be said of our environment, though.
Chewing gum is extremely durable, and it can stick around for years once you spit it out. While you can keep it off the streets by making sure your gum ends up in the garbage, it won’t degrade any more quickly in a landfill. And while a piece of gum here or there might not sound like a big deal, the sheer amount of it that gets chewed (and thrown away) on a daily basis is huge.
So what do we do with all that gum? Is gum recyclable? Well, you could put it in a gumdrop.
Gumdrop is a company that saw the problems chewing gum was creating and decided to find a solution to them before they got out of hand. Gumdrop provides bins for chewing gum waste disposal, and then it takes the gum and recycles it. Because with a little applied chemistry, all this chewing gum can be turned into raw materials useful for both the rubber and plastics industries.
In fact, one of the primary products created using this recycled chewing gum is the bright pink recycling bins that Gumdrop puts on the streets to collect used gum in the first place.
So the next time you look around and wonder how much time and effort it costs to scrape gum off the streets and sidewalks, remember there is a solution out there. Not only that but recycling chewing gum waste is a zero-waste solution that’s growing in popularity every, single day.
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