gum up

Many importers then quietly used the San Pedro ports to store containers, causing a logjam of ships waiting to berth and gumming up the entire supply chain system.

The housing market gummed up, people unable to move and all this at time when there is huge demand for more homes.

He said plastic bags are problematic for material recovery facilities where they are known to gum up machinery.

They don’t want to be picking time-consuming fights with the Lords, or creating laws that could be gummed up with hundreds of possible amendments – helpful tweaks - from their lordships.

Malformed proteins not only fail to carry out their tasks, they can accumulate and eventually gum up the inner workings of cells.