Published on:
27
July 2005
A new state of the art gum busting machine is the latest weapon being used in the Council's battle to clean-up the county's streets.
The £7000 machine is a first for the Council's Environmental Services who have tried a number of unsuccessful methods to blast the eyesore from the county's town centre pavements.
But this new piece of equipment, which uses a combination of a wire brush and detergent, is doing the trick.
Councillor Eddie Carrick, Convener of Enterprise and Environment Committee, said: "I know that residents and local businesses find discarded chewing gum a real eyesore and I am delighted to hear that we have found an effective method of removing it from our town centre pavements.
"The amount of chewing gum discarded which disfigures the county's streets is a disgrace and I don't think it's too much to ask people to dispose of their gum properly in a litter bin. I also feel a tax on chewing gum manufacturers could be the way forward, instead of local authorities picking up the bill for this problem."
You are invited to send a photographer to Tillicoultry High Street at 1pm on Wednesday 27th July when the new machine can be seen in action.
In the UK, 20 million people consume more than 935 million packs of gum a year, and many chewers are dropping or spitting their discarded gum on the streets. The cost of cleaning gum pollution from the nation's streets is more than £150 million a year.
Ewart McAuslane, the Council's Head of Environmental Services said: "We must convince people that it is socially unacceptable to discard gum in the street. We'd much rather be spending this money on other things but so long as people continue to deface our town centres, the Council has a responsibility to clean up after them.
"We have trialled other machines in the past, none of which have proved any good, but this machine is being successfully used by a number of other Councils, and does remove gum. We hope that it might also be employed in the war on graffiti and bill posters, complimenting the work our service does to make Clackmannanshire's streets as clean as possible."