Students construct 15ft sculpture with chewing gum 

Teachers normally spend much of their time stopping their charges from chewing gum but for more than 3,000 pupils, mastication was all part of a school project.

Chew beauty: Pupils added their gum to the work

This 4.5m (15 feet) high sculpture of a man with his arms raised aloft, created to mark the union of two Dutch art schools, is made entirely of chewing gum. The students, from De Eindhovense and SintLucas in the Netherlands, each chewed on a piece of gum before adding it to the structure. 

Jurian Strik, a spokesman from PR agency KesselsKramer, which was behind the project, said: ‘Youngsters no longer left their chewing gum under chairs and tables, but used it to create their own work of art.’ 

The work will stick around as gum can take five years to biodegrade. It will be at the STRP festival in Eindhoven in November.

Chewing gum stuck to pavements costs councils millions of pounds a year to clean up, but this could soon be a thing of the past.

Irish researchers have pioneered a new non-sticky, biodegradable gum by using cereal proteins instead of rubber.These proteins can be modified to increase their chewiness and could also be altered to have the same flavour and shelf-life as existing gum.