ABSTRACT
UK councils spend over 150 million a year removing chewing gum from pavements and other surfaces. Chewing gum is humankind's most common habit, with over 3.74 trillion sticks of the stuff made every year. In 2009 Anna Bullus was studying design when she had an idea to create bins specifically designed to deal with the problem of collecting chewing gum. However, it took another five years to commercialise and scale up the process to recycle chewing gum into marketable Gum-tec compounds that can be infinitely reprocessed without losing any of their first-generation qualities. She wanted to create a genuinely closed-loop recycling process that added value to an environmentally destructive material. By designing a chewing gum bin that was actually made of waste chewing gum, Bullus has simultaneously reduced the environmental burden of chewing gum while creating a clever product that requires this material to enable further production of Gumdrop Bins.
