Our parents warned us not to swallow gum, lest it get stuck inside us forever. They similarly wagged their finger at us for sticking it onto public surfaces, where it might also remain for an unsightly eternity.

Good digestion and moral cleanliness aside, properly disposing of your chewing gum could now also help to reduce medical litter in the form of lateral flow tests (LFTs) – those rectangular plastic testing devices that became ubiquitous during the pandemic.

While the little LFTs may appear as innocuous as, well, sticks of gum, they can build up as waste much the same: more than 4 bn of the single-use rapid tests are reportedly manufactured each year – requiring some 16,000 t of plastics – the vast majority of which are not recycled. Paired with the 3.74 tn sticks of chewing gum produced annually – what would our parents say?

An Edinburgh-based research team – dutiful sons and daughters all – at Heriot-Watt University, in collaboration with compatriot moulding company Great Central Plastics, has developed a new LFT prototype from discarded chewing gum, utilising the Gum-tec brand produced by London-based gum recycler Gumdrop. The gum-derived plastic reportedly serves as an alternative to polypropylene and can be used in a variety of products beyond LFTs, among them ice scrapers, paper clips, shoe outsoles, and even the recycling bins used to collect the waste gum in the first place. 

With such variety of possible applications, ‘gumming up the works’ may soon come to express the very opposite of its original meaning...