Ecuador: “Clean Quito” Campaign Fights Chewing Gum · Global Voices
Paulina Aguilera Muñoz

Historic Downtown Quito. Image by Flickr user Nelson Piedra used under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic Creative Commons license
Have you ever thought about how much it costs a municipality to remove chewing gum stuck to the pavement? Thousands of dollars in street cleaning, with special technology, are spent to fight this habit of discarding chewing gum on the ground. In Quito, the municipal government and several schools began a campaign that seeks to remove gum from the ground and make the capital cleaner.
The campaign “Quito Limpiecito” [Clean Quito] expects to remove 230,000 [es] pieces of gum disposed of in the city's historic downtown [es], as part of the project Patrimonio Sano [es] [Healthy Patrimony] that seeks to protect the first city declared as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, along with Krakow in Poland.
A gum “census” [es] took place and hundreds of students marked spots of gum in the streets with circles made with chalk. Some surprising figures [es] are:
800 estudiantes de 40 planteles educativos identificaron gomas de mascar en varios sitios del centro histórico. Cada chicle es retirado en 10 segundos.Miles de chicles marcados con tiza en el suelo de la plaza de Santo Domingo, en el centro, son removidos con dos hidrolavadoras, que utilizan agua a 150 grados centígrados de temperatura. El conteo determinó que hay un total de 47 042 chicles en la plaza de Santo Domingo y entre 10 y 15 chicles por m2 en la Plaza de la Independencia. El valor de una goma de mascar es de 5¢. En 2009 el retirar este dulce de piedras y calles costó $1,96, por metro cuadrado.
Centro Histórico [es] describes the campaign where young and old participate equally:
Funcionarios de la Administración Centro pusieron agua y limpiaron los  geranios de los balcones de su edificio; limpiaron vidrios y recogieron  la basura de las calles circundantes: Chile, Guayaquil. De igual manera  funcionarios de la Alcaldía hicieron su parte en la Plaza Grande,  Palacio Arzobispal y calles circundantes.
Edgaretsa (@edgaretsa10) shares images on Twitter [es]:
Niños contando la cantidad de chicles arrojados en la plaza en la campaña Quito Limpie cito http://yfrog.com/2r19usdj
Angel Sanchez (@AngelSanzC) re-tweeted about the campaign [es]:
RT @revistavistazo: #Quito Limpiecito. Campaña para sacar alrededor de 200.000 chicles pegados en el suelo del Centro Histórico || lampara!
As the following video shows, “Quito limpiecito” [pronounced leem-pieh-seetoh] is a clean city initiative that advances ideas, wishes and brings together young and old.