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skateboard wheels made from chewing gum
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skateboard wheels made from chewing gum

By the frankie team
19 May 2021

Two French students have come up with a novel way to repurpose old chewy.

Here’s a slightly scary fact: most modern chewing gum contains plastic and synthetic rubber. And while the urban legend about gum hanging around in your stomach for seven years is totally bogus, it’s true that chewy’s synthetic properties take ages to degrade once in landfill. In short, it isn’t great for the environment (or the look of city streets, for that matter).

Over in Nantes, France, design students Hugo Maupetit and Vivian Fische have come up with a novel use for discarded chewing gum: skateboard wheels. As part of their uni project, the duo popped boards up around the city encouraging passersby to contribute their chewy, rather than dropping it on the street. Once the boards were filled, they took it to a processing plant where the gum was ground up, mixed with natural binders and dyes, and injected into moulds to form the final skateboard wheels. The bubblegum pink and blue wheels, once worn down, can also be remelted and remade into another set. How bloody cool is that? Hugo and Vivian are yet to figure out if the solution is replicable on a large scale, but safe to say, watch this space.

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