God, you people are disgusting. The incessant chewing makes you look like a mouth-breathing retard, and all of you -- just like the smokers who consider the entire world their ashtray -- seem to think that once it leaves your mouth, the gum or cigarette butt just magically vaporizes. At least boogers don't stay sticky for long. Maybe you should take up chewing tobacco instead, that's dead sexy. I hate you.
Street Science: The Gum We Step In
Pretty much everything gets chewed out of gum and swallowed except the "gum base." That's unless the gum chewer swallows the gum, in which case the gum base passes through unchanged and moves on to waste-water treatment. Or so the gum companies and FDA tell us. Hence, gum base is not a food, and companies are free to keep us in the dark on its actual components. In fact, gum base is proprietary. Gum makers originally used natural rubbery substances like chicle to make the base, but now they employ any number and proportion of natural or synthetic latexes and rubbers. [...]
More than a ton of gum is stuck to the ground in the Mission District. Millions of pieces of chewing gum. Or more.
That's actual pieces, not the shadowy stains left behind after someone steams them off. And it's a low estimate. [...] I made this estimate by counting the gum blobs in each square of sidewalk I stepped on, measuring every 20 steps. If someone's done a more scientific calculation, let us know.
So on an average block of Harrison, which has little foot traffic compared to the rest of the Mission, I estimate 5,277 pieces of gum (not gum stains) per block, on the sidewalks of both sides of the street. Along 24th Street, where many of the sidewalk squares host more than 20 pieces of gum, the numbers are gonna be much higher. [...] Let's say 53,000 pieces per mile of street. 53,000 pieces/mile x 37 miles of street = 1.96 million pieces. [...] Let's say one quarter of the weight is gum base [...] That's 3,300 pounds of gum base on the ground - more than a ton.
Previously
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