Mexico, It’s Time to Revisit the Removable Gum Concept

Perhaps you caught this slow-news-day story about how the Mexican government, fed up with its pockmarked sidewalks, is asking its citizens to swallow their gum (which, by the way, doesn’t stay in your tummy for seven years). The reason? The average square meter of sidewalk is blemished with seventy dark spheres of spit-out gum. That’s a lot of gum.

To help clean up the mess, officials have invested in fancy German steam cleaners to get the stuff off the street. We can’t help but think they’re attacking the problem all wrong, though. Instead, why don’t they team up with the British scientists we wrote about last year, who have invented the first ever removable gum? In addition to being nonstick (which means toxic chemicals aren’t needed to remove them), the gum dissolves easily in water. Genius, no? Now we just need someone get that guck on the market.