Pi-Consulting

“Chicle! Chicle!”. The cry goes up from tens of thousands of street-sellers every day in Mexico City, hawking chewing-gum to the 25 million inhabitants of that vast conurbation. Once it has been masticated to the point where the taste is gone, where does the gum go next? Straight onto the sidewalk, where it bonds to the paving slabs, absorbs dirt and smog deposits, and reminds passers-by of someone else’s fleeting moment of pleasure, probably for years to come.

There’s your trouble. Discarded gum has a half-life almost as long as spent nuclear fuel rods. How big is the problem? A survey of street surfaces outside the city’s metro stations, and reported in the Washington Post, implies that there are around 70 bits of old gum per square meter on average. If the same concentration affects the whole surface area of Mexico City, Pi calculates that we are talking about 50 to 100 billion (yes billion) blots on the streetscape.

Where to start? The city’s co-ordinator of conservation for public spaces have vowed to scrub the historic central district clean of chicle deposits, and a crack team of gum-busters are attacking the blobs with steam jets and chemicals, starting in February. With hope in his heart, co-ordinator Ricardo Jaral Fernandez is also placing public trashcans in prominent locations, each blazoned with an exhortation to “love your city”.

Meanwhile, in a truly startling and radical development, the municipal government is giving notice that it plans to start enforcing its own recycling laws. By now, according to city planners, over 70% of the residents of Mexico City are supposed to be separating household waste for recycling. In reality, fewer than ten percent of the people in the capital do so. Entrenched attitudes are about as difficult to turn around as a supertanker in the Panama Canal.

Chewing-gum has been on sale in Mexico for over 120 years, and nearly all of it is unthinkingly spat onto the sidewalk. Changing the attitudes behind this behaviour means nothing less than re-shaping Mexicans’ attitude to civic pride. The initiative sadly sounds a little like Don Quixote tilting at gumballs. Pi wishes Sr. Jaral lots of luck with his praiseworthy attempt to change a century-old bad habit, and the shoulder-shrugging indifference that causes it.