Tired of Gums Sticking to Your Shoes? Company Tries to Solve Problem by Making Sneakers From Recycled Gum

Getting those irritating gums out of your sneaker could become quite a task which gets stuck while walking on roads. While chewing gums could be a nice pastime, its negative side is that it gets stuck to almost everything, worst being your shoes. Taking trouble, the gums are causing, Anna Bullus from the United Kingdom has come up with a solution. Her sustainability company Gumdrop has tied up with local designer Explicit Wear to create shoes from recycled gum! Yes, called Gumshoe, the shoe's soles are made of recyclable compounds produced by Gumdrop, called 'Gum-Tec'.

The components are made up of 20 percent components present in gums. According to the project, around 3.3 million pounds of gums end up on the Amsterdam streets each year. It costs the government millions of dollars to clean up. In this project, around 2.2 pounds of gum is used for every four pairs of shoes. The gum used to make the shoes was scraped from the Amsterdam streets.

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Anna Bullus, managing director and designer at Gumdrop told Reuters, "We discovered gum is made from a synthetic rubber. And by breaking down these properties, we were able to create a new type of rubber." The Gum-Tec compounds are formed as granules and are then moulded into the sole of the shoe, which also features a map of the city. According to the report, the entire world spends about USD 25 billion a year in cleaning used gum off the streets.

"We started looking for a way to make people aware of this problem. That's when the idea began to create a product people actually want from something no one cares about," The Verge quoted a spokesperson for the collaboration, Jonathan Van Loon as saying. Van Loon said that the compounds are as strong as normal rubber and even smell of gum sans the stickiness.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 26, 2018 09:09 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).