Flintshire County Council has been working to clean up gum and reduce people littering their gum with help from a Chewing Gum Task Force grant, administered by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy.

Flintshire County Council has announced that it has completed its work to remove the chewing gum blighting local streets after receiving a £27,500 grant to tackle the issue earlier this year.

The council was one of 52 across the country that successfully applied to the Chewing Gum Task Force, now in its fourth year, for funds to clean gum off pavements and prevent further gum littering.

Among the activities cleansing teams have carried out over the past few months are cleansing and erecting signage.

The Task Force is funded by major gum manufacturers including Mars Wrigley and Perfetti Van Melle, with an investment of up to £10 million spread over five years.

Established by Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) and run by environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy, the Chewing Gum Task Force Grant Scheme is open to councils across the UK who wish to clean up gum in their local areas and invest in long-term behaviour change to prevent gum from being dropped in the first place.

Monitoring and evaluation carried out by Behaviour Change – a not-for-profit social enterprise – has shown that in areas that benefitted from the first year of funding, a reduced rate of gum littering was still being observed six months after the clean-up and installation of prevention materials.

Estimates suggest the annual clean-up cost of chewing gum for councils in the UK is around £7 million and, according to Keep Britain Tidy, around 77% of England’s streets and 99% of retail sites are stained with gum.

A spokesperson for Keep Britain Tidy said: “Chewing gum continues to be an unsightly form of litter in our public spaces – though thankfully the scheme is leading to significant reductions. People need to remember that disposing irresponsibly of their gum causes harm to our environment as it takes years to decompose naturally – and, ultimately, costs the public purse to clean it up.”

By combining targeted street cleaning with specially designed signage to encourage people to bin their gum, participating councils last year achieved reductions in gum littering of up to 60% in the first two months.