This is a stick up
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1519726,00.htmlTim Adams
Sunday July 3, 2005
The ObserverChewing gum gets under our feet and costs us millions a year to clean up. Yet, for all the annoyances it causes, it can inspire artists and philosophers. As the late Primo Levi observed, it sticks to your mind as well... Facts stick to chewing gum. Read anything about it and you come away with non-biodegradable numbers, stubborn statistics: there are 28 million regular chewers in Britain; nearly a billion packs of gum are sold here each year. By some estimates, up to 3.5 billion gobs of gum have at one time or another been spat or dropped on to our streets; 92 per cent of city paving stones have had gum stuck to them.
In 2003, local councils received half-a-million complaints about gum on pavements or, worse, on shoes, or, worst, in hair. Each piece dropped costs about 10p to remove. And - this one is often the killer - despite the efforts of Swat teams armed with lasers, scrapers, dry ice and high-pressure water nozzles, about 300,000 bits of gum adhere to benches and pavements in London's Oxford Street at any one time.
One thing that these numbers prove is that sometimes it's hard to see what's right in front of you. I walked over many million paving stones before noticing that those irregular, black-and-grey circular markings on them were flattened pieces of Doublemint or Juicy Fruit. The moment of realisation came about 10 years ago, when I read a posthumous collection of newspaper columns by Primo Levi. Not long before his suicide, it seems, the chemist and survivor of Auschwitz had become preoccupied by the ground beneath his feet, seeing everywhere remnants of human traffic, little memento mori. 'Adhaesit pavimento anima mea'; 'My soul clings to the pavement,' he wrote.
Along with Levi's soul on the asphalt was all the other evidence that 'future archaeologists will find there like insects in amber: Coca-Cola caps and the rip-off tabs from beer cans [showing] the quality of our alimentary choices', and, in particular, 'chewed gum.' Levi became something of a cartographer of this streetscape. 'Gum can be found everywhere,' he observed, 'but a more attentive examination reveals that it reaches maximum density in the vicinity of the most frequented bars: the chewer who is headed there is forced to spit out to free his mouth. As a result, the stranger, not familiar with the city, could find these places following the direction of the more thickly massed gum blobs, in the same way as sharks find their wounded prey by swimming in the direction of increasing concentrations of blood...'
I have, once or twice, in the absence of a guidebook, attempted to use this method of navigation - it is, in my experience, at best hit and miss - but Levi was right in one sense: once you have started to see the gum, you can't stop. It's like 10,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire; you have to count them all. For a long time, it seemed, most of us could live with the fact of discarded gum without undue worry. Recently, however, all those numbers, all that gum, have come to look, for some, like a symbol every bit as potent as a 'hoodie' or a graffiti tag, a signifier that we are going to the dogs, that social bonds are loosening, that 'yob culture' is ascendant. It is for this reason that the battle against chewing-gum blobs has become a new front line in the war on antisocial behaviour.
The minister for Gum, among other things, is Ben Bradshaw, the MP for Exeter. He chairs the Chewing Gum Action Group, which is responsible for a new system of on-the-spot fines for gum-dropping and for gum-educational initiatives. Bradshaw is not a chewer himself except, he says, in his youthful New Labour way 'when dancing or clubbing', and, even on these big nights out, he is sure to wrap his wad in a piece of silver paper and dispose of it with proper care.
I met him, along with a couple of civil servants last week, at his offices at Defra (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), to ask why chewing gum has been receiving government attention of late. He replied with something that these days sounds a bit like his party's ideology.
He'd just come out of an election campaign where the issues people talked to him about on the doorstep were not the issues that concerned the upmarket media and the political classes - pensions, Iraq and so on. More often than not, these people were concerned by the things going on outside their front door. It was, he believed, only right for central government to respond to these concerns.
'We've had fantastic feedback from the public for our pilot [gum] schemes. I was presented yesterday with a two-inch stack of local-newspaper cuttings. Also,' he said, with some glee, 'it's very rare that the Labour government gets a front-page splash and a generally positive editorial in the Daily Mail. It shows these are issues that are a concern for people.'
The chewing-gum issue feeds into the Prime Minister's 'Respect Agenda' (which backbenchers, apparently, have a cruel habit of calling the 'Ali G agenda'). Blair, in some reports, stumbled upon this set of policies quite early in his political career when he opened his door in Islington one evening and found a man peeing up his neighbour's wall. It wasn't on, he thought. In the years since, this surprise encounter has hardened into legislation. A ministerial committee on respect is currently being convened. The chewing-gum pilot schemes, supported by the Clean Neighbourhoods Bill, are one aspect of this.
If this sounds a bit like government being led by the red ink of local newspaper letters pages, micro-attentive, that is exactly what it should sound like. 'People notice these things,' Bradshaw says. 'In the way that they do not, say, notice climate change, on a daily basis. They may think climate-change is serious but how imaginable is it in reality? But if your street is cleaned, if your bin is emptied, you notice immediately. It is not just that it is the right thing to do but also in terms of public perceptions these are important initiatives.'
Never slow to react to the idea of public perception, the government's gum policy has been quickened by the calls from some more militant councils, for a gum tax. In February, half-a-dozen city councils, led by Liverpool and Westminster, held a 'gum summit', where delegates signed a giant postcard that was delivered to Wrigley's head office in Plymouth. The card showed pictures of the cities involved with the words: 'Dear Wrigley's, wish you weren't here.' The gum lobby, fed up with lasering, scraping and water nozzles, was working on the principle that 'the polluter pays'.
Bradshaw sees this idea, of taxing Wrigley's a penny a pack to help out with cleaning pavements, as the 'Singapore route', penalising the multinational for the behaviour of the consumers (Lee Kwan Yew famously banned chewing gum in 1992 for the same reasons). 'It would be absurd,' he says. Instead, the government is looking at co-operation with the maker, at gum wardens and gum-dropping fines. 'Wrigley's has put considerable amounts of money to fund the three pilot schemes in three areas,' Bradshaw says. 'And the evidence is encouraging.'
Alan Bradley, a Westminster councillor and spokesman for the gum-taxers has little faith in wardens. 'It's ridiculous. How often do you spot someone in the act of dropping gum?'
A couple of days after I had seen Ben Bradshaw, I put Mr Bradley's question to the two employees of Maidstone City Council whose new job is to do just that.
Nick Harrison is an ex-policeman, and his right-hand man, Trevor Ford, is a former trainee in the environment department. They wear litter- warden uniforms, and have constant radio contact with the police. The key to successful gum-wardening, Nick explains, is not to walk purposefully, but to amble. In this way, they cover maybe eight miles a day.
In the six weeks that they have been patrolling the city's pedestrianised shopping area, with the back-up of 24-hour CCTV, so far Nick and Trevor have seen one man in the act of dropping gum. They threatened him with a £50 fine, though, in the end, they could not make the fine stick because it was not clear whether 'the target' had dropped his gum on public or private property.
In addition, they have issued 30 fines, one a day, for people dropping cigarette butts or sandwich packets. This relatively small return is either proof of Councillor Bradley's point, or, as Nick and Trevor suggest, evidence that their educative message is getting through.
There have been suggestions that chewing-gum and cigarette-butt fines might be used as a cash resource for the council. Maidstone has said that revenue raised would be swallowed by the annual £50,000 cost of employing the 'street-protection officers'. Trevor and Nick's primary responsibility as regards gum is to help distribute 'Stubbis', reusable plastic pouches, airtight and heat-resistant, in which cigarette ends and gum can be stowed. With the help of Laura and Sarah in a gum-information caravan in the precinct, they have given away 14,000 Stubbis and everyone has seemed positive. The only problem, Nick points out, in the fact that a number of people who have picked up one of the pouches have wandered off and dropped the cellophane packet in which the Stubbi is packed on to the street.
One of the problems with trying to stop antisocial behaviour, it seems, is that no sooner have you curtailed one nuisance than you have encouraged another. The outlawing of smoking has been so effective that many smokers have been turning in desperation to gum. As a result, Wrigley's sales figures advanced by 17 per cent in the first quarter of the year. This is the latest stage of expansion in the gum market that began a century ago and shows no sign of slowing.
Wrigley, which dominates the worldwide chewing-gum industry, was the initiative of one man.
If William Wrigley had been around today, he might well have qualified for an Asbo. He was expelled from school in Philadelphia aged 11 for throwing a pie at the nameplate over the entrance hall. He was subsequently sent to work in the family's soap factory, where he spent years stirring pots of boiling soap with a wooden paddle.
In 1891, aged 29, he arrived in Chicago with $32 in his pocket and a plan to sell soap and baking powder. A machine to produce chewing gum had been patented in America 20 years earlier by Thomas Adams, who had bought a consignment of a particular latex, chicle, from the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico in order to make tyres, but found that chewing the stuff, as the Mayan Indians had done for centuries, might be more marketable. Wrigley thought mint-flavoured sticks of chicle gum might work well as a free gift with his soap powder.
Like all great empires, Wrigley's was built on a mixture of exploitation and myth; the exploitation was of the chicle farmers who lived as tied labour in the most desperate conditions, climbing trees with a haphazard system of ropes to tap the latex. The empire's myth came from Wrigley's marketing genius. 'Anyone can make gum,' Wrigley said. 'Selling it is the hard part.' In many ways, as Wrigley was among the first to understand, gum is the perfect consumer product. It is cheap, infinitely replicable and is a reliable conveyer of a minor, fleeting gratification. It is harmless, and mostly purposeless, so you can make it mean anything you want.
Like any good snake-oil salesman, he managed to link his product to health - it could calm nerves, relieve thirst, freshen breath and sharpen appetite - and to sex and celebrity: it was Wrigley who introduced baseball cards and who invested heavily in making his product assume a kind of rebellious glamour. He bought the first electric signs in Times Square. By the time of his death in 1932, Wrigley was one of the 10 wealthiest men in America; he had never raised the price of his gum, but had invested more than $100 million in the new concept of brand advertising.
His famously secretive company has stayed in the family ever since, and is now run in 180 countries by the fourth William Wrigley Jnr. Wrigley's world domination came in part from a very good war. Because of its thirst-relieving properties and because it was, as every council environment officer knows, virtually indestructible in extremes of heat or even submersion in water, gum was standard issue in every GI's rations; chicle became one of America's most significant wartime commodities and 150 billion sticks of gum were shipped out to boost the troops. The war was, also, the ideal export campaign for Wrigley's. The gum handed out by GIs across the world was often the first contact foreign populations had had with America and chewing became associated with the new freedoms and sexual possibility of pop culture.
Jo Hartop, head of communications for Wrigley's UK, and the company's representative on the Chewing Gum Action Group, still believes those values adhere to the gum, along with new, more health-conscious sugar-free associations that have brought five million new chewers to the British market. This latter group looks set to expand as the gum-maker explores the possibilities of gum as a potential 'delivery system' for all manner of pharmaceuticals, from aspirin to Viagra.
A more pressing challenge, though, is to respond to the demands of street cleaners and produce a biodegradable gum. Apparently, the world's great polymer scientists have been locked away for years in pursuit of this particular holy grail. I ask Jo Hartop how it's going. 'We are working on a less sticky gum base, but it's difficult, in that stickiness is what makes the product what it is. If we can't keep that chewiness in gum, then it ceases to be chewing gum.' So far, apparently, Wrigley has spent £5m trying to make a biodegradable gum, unsuccessfully (other attempts such as one announced by Bristol University last Friday, are a long way from being commercially viable).
If they thought it would help, Jo Hartop suggests, Wrigley's would even countenance going along with a chewing-gum clean-up tax, but all the evidence suggests it would be futile. 'What is coming out of the research is that people who drop gum mostly don't realise that they are littering.'
The Chewing Action Group spent £60,000 of tax-payers' money on a chewing gum segmentation survey, a 162-page report, based on 1,000 street interviews, which revealed how people chewed and why they spat. The survey identified five types of gum-droppers, and helpfully provided cartoon drawings of each of them. The 'Selfish Cleanser' at one end of the scale was typically a nicely groomed young woman who chewed because it freshened her breath.
Though she was revolted by the sight of other people's discarded gum, she would blithely spit her own out of her car window. The 'Bravado', meanwhile,was a young, male Sun reader who chewed his gum ostentatiously. The 'bravado' imagined it to be both big and clever to spit out the gum and kick it. And so on.
The expertise that Wrigley can bring to the action group, Hartop insists, is in communication. 'We are very good at educating people about our product. But gum-dropping is not just Wrigley's problem,' she insists, 'it is a wider problem in society.'
John Carey, Merton professor of English at Oxford, argued recently that, 'like fly-tippers, gum-spitters register themselves as a disaffected underclass with no share in communal aspirations. Our ruined education system is partly to blame, but so is the vast inequality of wealth we permit, which breeds despair'.
I was thinking about this - can we really blame gum-spitting on vast inequalities? - while following a sporadic bright trail of carefully painted gum blobs, each one a unique little work of art, along Barnet High Street in north London. At the end of the trail, I found Ben Wilson. Wilson is a wonderful, playful carver of wood. For the best part of the last year, however, he has devoted himself to painting painstaking miniatures on gum on pavements. His original plan was to make his trail run from his home in Barnet into the city centre, but, mostly, he has ended up working from 7.30am to 6pm in his local neighbourhoods. Wilson, 41, doesn't like to intellectualise what he does very much, but it's a political act as much as anything. 'In part, you are turning a thoughtless action into something positive,' he says. 'And, technically, it is not criminal damage, because you are painting the gum, not the pavement.' More than that, though, he believes local people like the continuity. 'It is important that I am here every day and people can see that I care about what I am doing.' He burns the gum first with a blow- torch, then adds a clear enamel, then colours, acrylic enamels. And, finally, a varnish, so you end up with a vivid, solid picture.
He has a large exercise book full of backlogged requests for designs, which he flips through. Local kids and grandmothers ask him to do particular designs; he commemorates, on gum, births and deaths, young love and marriages. 'You will get a gang of kids; one of them wants to do a picture, something personal to them. I've got to know a lot of the taggers, the graffiti writers, and they understand it all immediately.'
Wilson's take on what leads to the disaffection implicit in gum-dropping is somewhat different from John Carey's.
'Kids are not allowed to feel any connection with where they live,' he says. 'They can't play in the streets because they are likely to get run over; then you have the national curriculum, and all this testing at school, and no opportunity to play or to make things, and everything you do outside is recorded on surveillance cameras. The only imagery that children see around them are billboards and TV; every part of their environment is out of bounds or sold off. That's why they don't care about their streets. This is a small way of connecting people.'
Wilson laughs at the idea of fines. The government should be thinking about the causes of antisocial behaviour, not posturing about fining kids. 'At a time when you have a government labelling all young people as yob culture, I think it is important to try to give people a voice. It is such a destructive definition. If you get to know young people, you realise they are all individual. They all can find their own creativity. My paintings are a way of reflecting people back to themselves.'
Wilson was arrested recently in Trafalgar Square for doing a careful miniature of Nelson and Hardy on a piece of gum. 'The police tried to stop me and I jumped up on a stage that was there and said I was being arrested for painting chewing gum. The police were all after me, eight of them scaling this podium. They got these handcuffs on me.' He was put in the back of a van, fingerprinted, photographed, DNA-tested. They held and questioned him for three or four hours.
I wondered if he imagined he might be starting a movement, a trend, and that all the dropped gum will one day not be scraped up or left greying but transformed into vibrant life.
'It could go any way,' he says. 'I like the quietness of what I have done. If people want to start doing things on a local scale, it could be fun. It might even be beautiful.' He laughs. From quite early on, he says he has had advertisers approaching him, wondering if he would do product endorsements on the gum. 'The kids look out for them, you see, and the advertisers love that.
Those people get everywhere.'
