In 1870, the world's first chewing gum factory was built by American inventor Thomas Adams in New York; Adams discovered the gum base 'chicle" from a Mexican General who was exiled in New York. Instead of finding use for the substance as a substitute for rubber to make toys and rain boots, Adams gave up the idea and went into developing the substance in the same way it was introduced to him by the Mexican general, as a chewing gum.
Back then chewing gum removal was not a problem. This was because the sap they chewed was all natural and a hundred percent biodegradable. People were chewing gums made from the all natural gum base "chicle", which came directly from the sap of spruce or sapodilla trees.
The Problems with Chewing Gums Today
The demand for chewing gum became so high that manufacturers had to find artificial substitutes in order to supply the demand of people chewing gum in almost every part of the world. Everybody seemed to be chewing gum, but a sapodilla or spruce tree can only be tapped once, it will take another three or four years before the chicle gum base can be extracted.
An artificial gum base solution was finally formulated, and manufacturers didn’t find it necessary to disclose the ingredients that were used to produce this artificial gum base. This was vaguely referred to in chewing gum wrappers as “gum base”. The curiosity on what this gum base is made of stems from the fact that chewing gums have become a global litter problem, except for Singapore who deemed it fit to ban chewing gum as early as 1992.
It was established that the mysterious gum base is made up of styrene-butadiene rubber, polyethylene and polyvinyl acetate; the natural latex ingredient was very minimal. These ingredients are basically the same compounds in producing rubber tires and plastic bags. Hence further investigation of all factors surrounding chewing gum and how it affects the environment revealed the following:
- Based on 2005 statistics 650,000 metric tons of chewing gum are produced each year and they all end up stuck somewhere in our environment. Another 5 years of chewing gum produced will amount to 1 million metric tons of chewing gum wastes. Unless, chewing gum litter is cleaned off, scientists believe that gum chewed by persons with coughs, sneezes, dirty hands, body fluids of persons with bacterial infections, are stuck carelessly around still carrying live bacteria. Hence the people in said areas especially in crowded places can catch microorganisms while airborne.
- Now this was quite alarming since the incidences of airborne infectious diseases seem to be occurring globally and frequently. Government authorities in the U.S. and U.K. implemented more vigorous methods of chewing gum removal. However, an analysis of the cost it takes to clean up each stick of chewing gum is estimated at $1.50-$3.00. Hence if there are about 374 trillion sticks of chewing gum manufactured each year, the cost it would take to clean up even a third of what has been produced is obviously tremendous.
- Chewing gum manufacturers have been asked to come up with non-sticky or biodegradable chewing gums. In addition, there is a proposal for these manufacturers to take part in cleaning up the mess they are partly responsible for.
The Revival of the Chicle Chewing Gum
A small cooperative located near the Mexican rainforest has been reviving the industry as well as the skills needed in order to produce a certified organic easy-to-remove chewing gum. Workers known as “chicleros” are being trained to preserve the rainforests and they are at the same time tasked to get the sap from the trees. Similar to how chewing gum was before, the renewed chewing gum is said to breakdown and dissipate immediately after chewing.
Accordingly, the cooperative is made up of small groups of producers that have been supplying natural gum mostly to Japan. These small production units found it best to form themselves into a cooperative in order to meet another world demand for chicle.