Removing Chewing Gum In Schools With The i-remove

Chewing gum is a nightmare for school cleaners and business managers. Its removal is costly, involving the use of external contractors or significant additional in-house labour.

Sometimes it's just too hard to do anything about. School cleaners have limited time to get all the cleaning done. This often means gum removal is pushed off until the school holidays, if it gets done at all.

Case study: the chewing gum issue at Willetton Senior High School

As one of the largest public schools in Western Australia – with currently over 2500 students – Willetton Senior High School employs a large school cleaning staff to manage routine and periodical cleaning tasks.

Chewing gum had always been a significant issue for the cleaners with buildings, concrete, and paved surfaces of various ages throughout the school. Gum removal was left to the periodical cleans during the holidays, when they would tackle it with a 2000psi cold water pressure cleaner. This was an extremely slow and completely ineffective method on older pieces of gum.

Having contractors come in with hot water pressure cleaners was expensive and unsustainable for the school as an ongoing solution.

To remove the gum from entrance matting was also very difficult, with staff using hot water and scrubbing brushes. This was highly labour intensive and produced poor results. A better gum removal solution was required.

Read top questions answered about gum removal machines.

A faster way to eliminate chewing gum

The i-remove was designed to solve many common challenges of chewing gum removal. It can remove gum from carpets, concrete and pavers – in fact, it removes gum from virtually any surface.

We brought the i-remove along to Willetton SHS and tried it out with Head Cleaner, David Gochez. David has led the cleaning at Willetton SHS for many years and has seen and tested a wide range of commercial cleaning solutions to improve cleaning processes. He took the i-remove straight to some of the oldest areas of the school, where gum had been stuck for 10 years or more.