You May Want to Rethink Your Gum Chewing Habit. It’s Essentially Plastic.

Because everything fun and joyous is destroying the world, there’s news today that chewing gum might be a significant source of plastic pollution.

According to new research, chewing gum manufacturers have been hesitant to tell us that their product is essentially plastic and breaks down into those wonderful microplastics we all keep hearing so much about.

David Jones from the University of Portsmouth in England published some research suggesting that the chewing gum that freshens our breaths and decorates the undersides of our children’s school desks is made from synthetic oil-based rubbers similar to the plastic used in car tires and other materials you wouldn’t want to chew.

If you have not been thoroughly terrified by the mere mention of the word microplastics, allow me to frighten you real quick: damn near everything human beings manufacture is poisoning the world with tiny bits of plastic that end up embedded deep within every part of our bodies and gets deposited on some of our most precious protected lands through rain.

Are microplastics killing us all and destroying the world? Very possibly! Though, we’re still learning about them and the extent to which they are killing us and everything around us.

And now we can add chewing gum to the list of things killing us. The substances used in common chewing gums that are helping to destroy the world include styrene-butadiene, polyethylene, and polyvinyl acetate—compounds found in tires, plastic bags, and wood glue, respectively.

Jones says major gum manufacturers like Wrigley don’t disclose these chemicals, instead choosing to hide them behind the vague term “gum base.” But now you’ll know that whenever you see the term “gum base” on a pack of Doublemint, you might as well be chewing on a set of Michelins and washing it down with a thick glass of Elmer’s.

The researcher went on to explain that 1.74 trillion pieces of gum are produced annually, with each one weighing about 1.4 grams. That means we’re producing 2.4 million tons of chemical-filled, microplastic-producing gum every year.

Over time, decades to be exact, the gum fused to our roads and hanging out in our grass breaks down into microplastics that get absorbed into our soil and water supplies.

Jones says cleaning up gum is just a Band-Aid on a larger wound. The real problem is that the gum itself is not biodegradable and is ultimately just another microplastic pollutant alongside plastic water bottles, fast food wrappers, and pretty much everything else factories churn out.