STREET CLEANERS everywhere will be celebrating the news that researchers in Cork have developed a fully biodegradable chewing gum. Taste testers confirm it chews like the real thing, if you throw it on to the pavement the birds will eat it and it won’t stick to your shoe if you step on it.
“You could just sweep it off the ground – it doesn’t stick at all,” said the woman who led the research, University College Cork’s Prof Elke Arendt.
She has the enviable job of leading Cork’s brewery research unit and also its cereals research team and it was through this channel the wonder gum arose. “It is all natural and based on a cereal protein. We have tried it with test panels and it chews like a normal chewing gum,” she promises.
While it starts out like a regular stick of gum it slowly breaks down as you chew and will disappear completely after 45 minutes of mastication, she said. The more impatient among us can just swallow it if that is too long.
And if someone was bad enough to toss the miracle gum on the pavement, birds can help themselves to a chew without any harm, she said. “It is very similar to them eating a piece of bread.”
Naturally the UCC team patented the technology and are ready to bring it to market. “It has huge commercial potential in the food ingredient market,” says Prof Arendt. “We have had a number of multinationals approach us.”
The gum research was funded by the Department of Agriculture but the discovery came when Prof Arendt was studying new gluten-free foods.
Dublin City Council is likely to celebrate her discovery. Last year it spent €334,200 spraying and scraping away discarded gum.