Keeping Dog Waste Out of Landfill

Mar 6, 2020 | Reducing Waste

What do you do with your dog waste? I’m posting a quick post today with a little update about our goal of eliminating organic waste from our landfill bin. The one organic that has, until now, continued to go into our landfill bin is dog poo, whether collected from the backyard or in a little baggie on her daily walk. Not only did this bother me because of the detrimental impacts of organics in landfill, it also stunk out our bin! So, after months of having this job on my to-do list, we finally created our dog poo composter a couple of weeks ago.

Dog Poo Composter

We followed the instructions on The Green Hub blog. Ours is quite a bit smaller but so is our lovely dog, Lucy. She’s a Lagotto Romagnolo and is about 16kg. It will be interesting to see how long it takes us to fill this bin.

Photo by Family Footprint Project

Dog poo composing systems such as EnsoPet by Bokashi One are now available to buy but, as you know, I try to use secondhand first. The instructions on The Green Hub essentially create the same kind of system as the commercially available one but with a repurposed container. I picked up our bucket from a member of my Buy Nothing group. They had received it from our local bulk food store, The Source. It is about 15L so somewhat smaller – and squarer! – than the one used by The Green Hub but larger than the EnsoPet so it seemed to be fit for the purpose. We’ll see how it goes.

The only reason this took me so long to implement is that I’m pretty hopeless at digging holes! I did start but came to a (rocky) stop. I finally called in the expert hole digger and he got the job done. So it is now installed and used daily. So far so good.

Image by Compostapak

Dog Poo Collection

As far as dog poo collection goes, it has been difficult to find a convenient solution to picking up Lucy’s waste when out for a walk. I came across Rufus & Coco dog poo bags at Woolworths that are made from corn starch and are biodegradable. They claim that the bags will break down completely within twelve months in landfill. We’ll see how they do in the composter.

UPDATE: I have just bought dog bags from Compost-A-Pak who are an Australian company who use waste corn to create certified compostable products. The Dog Waste bags look promising and I’ll be interested to see how they go in our Dog Waste composter.

How do you deal with your dog waste or the waste from other pets? I’d love to hear your tips and tricks for sustainable pet ownership. Please leave a comment below.

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Keeping Dog Waste out of Landfill Pinterest Image