The Polluter Pays Principle: Mexico Considers Chewing Gum Tax Ari Daniel Shapiro - PRI's The World
go to original March 25, 2013

A worker cleans gum from the sidewalk. (Ari Daniel Shapiro)

Francisco Madero Street is a busy pedestrian thoroughfare in the heart of Mexico City. There is so much going on that it is easy for people to overlook what is right beneath their feet. The beige pavement is freckled with black spots the size of coins.

“All these little black dots are pieces of chewing gum stuck to the ground,” says Ricardo Jaral Fernandez. He oversees the maintenance of public space in the city center.

Today, his team has cordoned off a section of the street. Oscar Javier Cadena Mendosa uses a manual counter to tally the number of gum spots here.

After five minutes of counting in an area about the size of two parking spaces, he announces the total: “280!”

The last time he and his team counted along this entire street, which stretches for several blocks, there were 80,000 pieces of gum.

Jaral Fernandez has launched an all out cleaning offensive. He points to a small metal box connected to a long hose with a brush on one end. The hose ejects steam and a special cleaning fluid. A worker rubs the brush on a gum spot, and the gum literally dissolves.

But even a crew of 10 people working full-time is not enough to keep up with all the gum accumulating on the streets. And this is an expensive undertaking.

It costs three times as much to clean up a piece of gum as it does to buy it in the first place, which means those sticks of gum are a bigger drain on the government’s budget than on the wallets of the gum chewers themselves.

Read the rest at PRI's The World

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!