By gum!

I read recently about a 'new' invention that should help keep city streets looking at least a little better than their measle-spotted state at the moment.

Biodegradable chewing gum, that breaks down naturally fairly quickly when exposed to the elements, doesn't appear to be available in the corner shop just yet, but it has been picked up by newspapers as the new solution for cleaner streets. Of course, like so many things in our papers, 'new' is a relative term - the invention happened in 2005 as a byproduct in biofuel developments. But hey, it ain't here yet, so that's close enough to new for most of us.

I knew used gum stuck around (sorry) for a long time on pavements, not to mention the underneath of seats and so on. But I didn't realise that the gum people chew today is largely a synthetic rubber compound. It is composed of a man-made polymer base that makes it stretchy and chewable, and resistant to being broken down by natural biological actions.

This base also happens to bind very happily with the polymers in asphalt, which is why it sticks with such tenacity when spat/thrown/dropped on the ground. This new degradable gum base - one of the first significant developments in chewing gum technology for over 110 years, by the way - is said to harden rather than sticking when spat out, and it is supposed to decompose biologically in just a few weeks.

That's all very well, a triumph of engineering and all that - but...
Wouldn't it be nice if people didn't spit the damn stuff out wherever they happen to be in the first place?