I would bet we have all been at a restaurant where you look or feel under the table and it is covered with gum. The reason gum stays under there and gets hard like concrete is that normal gum is hydrophobic, meaning it won’t absorb water. A new high-tech gum is now available to alleviate all those gum-chewing fears for the current generation of 8-year-olds. The new gum is called Rev7 and is apparently the only biodegradable gum around. This gum is amphiphilic, so you can chew it but it will absorb water and degrade over time.

This gum is made to absorb water so you can clean it off the table or furniture if you need to. If someone spits it out on the sidewalk, the gum will turn into a fine powder in a few months. That is an interesting answer to a problem that I really never thought about.

[via Treehugger]

Researchers in the UK have devised a new mobile phone body which can simply be tossed into the compost heap, and will disintegrate within weeks. Once the phone’s shell has broken down, an embedded sunflower seed is released into the earth, sprouting life anew from your wayward technological garbage.

A team at the University of Warwick’s Warwick Manufacturing Group, in conjunction with PVAXX Research & Development Ltd. and Motorola used a special biodegradable polymer which is completely functional under normal working conditions, yet starts to rapidly decompose when placed in compost. Now they haven’t solved the problem of what to do with all those nasty toxins in your phone’s electronic components and battery pack, but at least they’ve got a solution for all those cheap plastic cases.

For those of us with iPhones, we’ll just have to melt down our aluminum and glass beauties using conventional recycling techniques when that iPhone 2.0 eventually comes along.

[via Baby Ruthless via Roadside Scholar]