Part of True Co., Copenhagen
Taking the plastic out of chewing gum was one half of the job. This is the other half: where the gum base comes from, who cuts it, what they are paid, and whether the forest is still standing afterwards.
Chicle is the latex of Manilkara zapota, the sapodilla — a slow, hard, long-lived tree that grows wild through the Yucatán peninsula and the Petén. It has been tapped there commercially for more than a century and chewed there for a great deal longer. It is the gum base chewing gum was made of before the industry moved to synthetic rubber.
A chiclero climbs the trunk on a rope and cuts a shallow channel up it in a zig-zag, alternating side to side. Latex runs down the channel into a bag at the base and is boiled down the same night. Nothing is felled and nothing is cleared. The tree closes the wound and is not touched again for six to eight years, which is roughly how long it takes to be worth touching.
The point is arithmetic. A tapped tree pays a harvester for a lifetime; a felled one pays once. Where chicle has a buyer, the communities who hold these forests have a reason to keep them standing, and where it doesn’t, the land goes to cattle. Buying chicle is the cheapest conservation instrument we have access to, so we would like to buy more of it.