Big gum has a dirty secret...We've been chewing thousands of tons of plastic.
Regular chewing gum accounts for some of the most blatant pollution in our daily lives, and yet most of us don’t realise it's a single-use plastic!
Yep, you read that right! Regular chewing gum is a single-use plastic. In the UK alone, some 100,000 tons of it is chewed every year, and 95% of the country’s streets are stained with it.
How does big gum get away with it?
The plastic is hidden under the term gum base within the ingredients list. Gum brands don’t have to disclose that their gum base is made from plastic! It’s deceiving, not to mention disgusting. It's out there for all to see – plastering our pavements and stuck to our shoes.
Some of the plastics that can be found in regular gum:
- Butadiene-styrene rubber
- Isobutylene-isoprene copolymer (butyl rubber)
- Paraffin (via the Fischer-Tropsch process)
- Petroleum wax
- Petroleum wax synthetic
- Polethylene
- Polvinyl acetate
Polyethylene is used in plastic bags and is also one of the main culprits behind the 21 million tonnes of micro-plastics thought to be in the Atlantic Ocean.
You might remember using a lot of Polyvinyl acetate at school - it's a thermoplastic polymer used to make PVA glue. Yum?! We thought not.
Fun fact!
According to HuffPost UK, Wrigley, the company responsible for brands such as Extra, Hubba Bubba and Airwaves, has confirmed that polyvinyl acetate is used in a selection of their products. You won't be surprised to hear that when asked which brands included this ingredient, they were unable to confirm...
We've got nothing to hide
Unlike most gum brands, we can confirm all the ingredients used in our recipes. You guessed it, they're all plastic free and plant based!
We make Nuud the way chewing gum was first made hundreds of years ago - using a sustainably harvested tree sap called chicle. It's this natural ingredient that makes our gum plastic free, plant based and biodegradable.
