The Clean Gum Won’t Stick

By Alice Turner
19:47, September 15th 2007
211 votes
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The Clean Gum Won’t Stick

Chewing gum promises to be a less dangerous and money-spending activity and let me give further details. It is dangerous for clothes, your hair, furniture and carpets and it is expensive in terms of cleaning the sticky spots.

The innovation comes from a Bristol University spin-out company named Revolymer plans to develop the manufacture of the revolutionary gum and it promises to maintain the taste, structure and chewiness the present gum has.

The idea of the new project came after becoming sick of the troubles globs of used gun can bring, the unpleasant discovery of one such thing under the table or on the chair, but also the large amount of money that is required to be spent in order to remove.

“We've been making new materials which we've added to a modified chewing-gum formulation which makes it much easier to remove - and in some cases it doesn't stick at all,” professor Terence Cosgrove, the firm's chief scientific officer explained.

The Clean Gum is the name of the new product and one another essential property is its biodegradability. Tests on pavements in Bristol and in several other towns in Wales conducted this summer have proved that the gum dissolves in water and it naturally disappears at the first rain.

Professor Cosgrove demonstrated the other properties of the gum at the British Association for the Advancement of Science conference in York yesterday. The presentation was a success, receiving the confirmation of a team of 20 leading chewing gum experts that it doesn’t lack at either consistence or taste.

Furthermore, they managed to demonstrate that the stickiness of the Clean Gum won’t pose any problems, being washable with shampoo and water, compared to the traditional products which, while stuck in somebody’s hair, they could only be removed by cutting the hair off.

To the synthetic rubber, sugar and other materials that are usually used for common gum, a harmless polymer compound called polyethylene oxide is added to obtain the biodegradable, non-sticky gum.

There are plans that during the next year the Clean Gum will become available to the consumers, sparing almost £150 million spent per year on spray jets, chemicals or other laser equipment to remove the gum from the pavements.



© 2007 - 2008 - eFluxMedia
Tags: gum, Clean Gum
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