Chance find may mean sticky end to chewing gum scourge
For they are on their way to creating a biodegradable and non-sticky chewing gum that will wash off pavements — and shoes — naturally after three days.
The new gum is being developed by a team of University College Cork food researchers led by Dr Elke Arendt and Dr Alan Kelly.
Dr Arendt said the chance discovery came about while her team was looking into making meals more palatable for people with coeliac disease, which means sufferers react badly to gluten in foods like bread and pasta.
“There are special foods on the market for people with coeliac disease but they tend not to be nutritionally balanced or tasty,” said Dr Arendt. “There are some excellent products but the majority are not very nice.”
The researchers were looking at new ingredients they could add to make foods more palatable to coeliacs when they found they had accidentally created an elastic “base material” that could be used for chewing gum.
“It was an accident — we were quite surprised when we found we had this elastic ‘base material’ and that’s how the chewing gum idea came about,” she said.
The new elastic base is derived from cereals already in the everyday diet and was made using new technological processes for manufacturing food.
By comparison, standard chewing gum is about 20% synthetic rubber base with the rest made up from sugar, thickeners, colourants, additives to retain moisture and flavourings.
Inside the mouth, traditional gum is soft and chewy but once the product leaves the mouth the substance becomes hard and sticky, and almost impossible to remove from pavements, seating or clothing without specialist cleaning.
According to reports, chewing gum accounts for a quarter of all Ireland’s street litter.
“We are confident that this ‘base material’ will be good for chewing gum — and the results so far suggest that in due course we will be able to produce a prototype gum,” said Dr Arendt.
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