Feeding raw.

 

Our county collects pet waste in the green bins. We use the recycling bags which are designated for the green bin to bag it up. And when walking the dog, I use the disposable poop bags. I KNOW they are biodegradable - I left one in a kitchen drawer a little too long, and it fell to pieces!

Since the pet waste is mixed in with all the other biodegradables, there is no problem with compost facilities accepting it.

I honestly don't know how environmentally friendly the green bin bags our, but since green bins are now the standard throughout Ontario, I would hope the bags we're supposed to use don't harm the environment.

Edit: I just looked it up, and it seems they are now making them out of plant starch, which, of course, is completely natural and biodegradable.

 

I was going to say, in Toronto, pet waste is part of the green bin compostable program like it is for @Sunsilver. We put both dog poop and cat litter in the green bin.

That's cool some bags are made out of plant starch!

I've always assumed (rightly or wrongly) that the green bin program employs some poor people whose job it is to take stuff out of bags...since apparently unlike recycling (reduce better!) most of our compost actually does get composted.

Nowhere in the US has industrial composting facilities to accept dog poop? I am surprised. That's a shame.

 

well, I walk the dogs on my own property until they do something. If not, we head back to the house and it's a shorter walk. If they do we take a walk up the road. Here at home I can dig a hole (I prefer mole mounds, they are pre-dug) and bury the dog mess. I use a shovel, not a plastic bag. I should also add it does not seem the moles like the additions to their mounds. They do not re-dig them. a win win?

 

Thanks for making this thread. This is one of the main reasons I try to get Willow to poop in the backyard, so I can put her poops in a paper bag. It goes to the landfill, but at least there's no plastic involved.

I wish the US had these awesome compost bins around like you have in Canada. :-(

 

Yes, it’s a scam. I bought some to use in my green waste then found they don’t accept it, so I used them for the dogs. I didn’t realize they don’t combust. I’ve seen plastic bags left outside decompose and they turn into thin shards that fly everywhere if the wind hits them. There really is no such thing as combustible plastic. I haven’t found anything better for picking up after my dogs away from home than small plastic bags. I recycle when I have old ones but otherwise, I buy small store bags in bulk and use those. At home, I have a scooter that picks up maybe half of it. If it’s too wet or stuck in a plant, it’s impossible to use a scooper, though.

 

Just takes some far-sighted people to create composting programs. My fav - Zoo Doo Compost - Woodland Park Zoo Seattle WA
been around for years.

 

I did once get some samples of starch-based bags -- they started to dissolve as soon as the particularly wet pile hit the bag and didn't last the whole way home on a very long walk. :yikes: That was a big "nope" for me -- I needed a second bag to re-bag what leaked out of the first bag. They might fine for getting your green stuff from the backyard to the bin but not for hour-long walks in wet weather.

Hippo Sack poop bags have are one of the few I was able to find that are labeled as having 100% recycled plastic (and they're big enough for gigantic piles), but they're a lot more expensive than generic virgin-plastic bags: https://www.amazon.com/Hippo-Sak-Extra-Dispenser-Plastic/dp/B07XYJ255Q

Where I live now, we don't even have green bins for yard waste. Green waste gets bagged up with the trash. We are one of the few houses in our subdivision that uses a mulching mower and an armadillo-proof backyard compost bin. I also made the yard guy who helped me with fall cleanup laugh when I told him to think of the family of speckled king snakes that he was sure to see in my backyard as my "pets" -- and not to harm them because they do good work keeping copperheads away from my yard.

@Buckelke - I love the idea of sending it down gopher holes or mole mounds!

 

@Sunsilver @jarn jealous - my area doesn’t allow pet waste in the green bin!!! And we only have garbage taken 2x a month 😵‍💫

 

When we had a sticks and bricks I put it in the yard waste paper bags with the lawn clippings. Now that we are in an RV I'm stuck using plastic bags. Many of the locals we find ourselves at don't even recycle.

 

Well, I am not overly concerned about the environmental impact of dogs. Sorry. They can poop for 13 years and not create the impact of a single jumbo-jet going across the country. It's a bit of poo. People freak out if you don't pick it up on a walk. So we pick it up. In a plastic bag. And add it to the landfills. It is not the worst thing in the landfills.

I used to pitch it over the edge of my ravine on my property, with no added inorganic material. But the new millenial, environmental-concious neighbors complained, so now I use extra-strong contractor bags to line the muck bucket and put it in the trash. Before the river took it and the stuff God created, bacteria, etc, that actually cleans the river, took care of it, never to be seen or heard of again. Now I am adding to the landfills. Thanks enviro-concious neighbors.

We just aren't that big. We do not create climate change. Climates have been changing long before humans graced the earth with their presence and still will long after humans cease to be. I am just not that worried about it. But it sounds like the compost bags are just another racket to scam people with.

 

I am fortunate to live in a hardwood forest. I walk the pups and mark any poop that is in an area where we frequently walk with a triangle of three sticks as there are always sticks to be found. The triangles are amazingly easy to spot so we don't accidentally step in poop. About once a week I do a patrol with a shovel and scoop up any poop that hasn't composted and throw it near the base of a tree, where no one is likely to step. In the summer, the marked piles are often empty by the time I police the area. Aside from composting we have dung beetles and other bugs who will dine on the stuff.

 

I use produce bags for the most part. And I try to have several doot piles per bag. They go to the landfill. An alternative is to line a bucket with the plastic grocery bag & fill by scooping. It can be tied shut between "routes" and account for several days "product."

When I can cut down on plastic, I try. I've vowed to buy no more fleece anything because fleece sheds microfibers into the ecosystem - and contaminates water. Jeans are another clothing item that shed's rotten products into the ecosystem -- less washing of both of these is better for the environment if not your personal appearance.

It's hard to escape plastic any more so I do what I can to first avoid it and when not avoidable, reuse it to the extent I can.

 

We can no longer get plastic bags at the grocery store. Okay, we can buy boxes of them for our trash, but all grocery bags must now be reusable or compostable (paper).

As for climate change, I learned about how CO2 causes global warming when I was in High School during the 1960's, and went on to study Environmental Science at university. 98% of scientists are convinced global warming due to CO2 emissions is a proven fact. The other 2% are likely being paid off by the oil companies to say it's a lie.

We could have had environmentally friendly vehicles and power a long time ago. The main problem was the oil and gas industries were invested in keeping the internal combustion engine. This is a fact I Iearned about in the 60's - every time some inventor came up with a viable alternative to a gas powered engine, the N. American car makers would buy up the design and patent, and no one would ever hear about it again.

Don't fool yourself - the oil and gas lobby is extremely powerful. They are also heavily subsidized by the government, and have the government in their pocket. They are perfectly capable of funding campaigns and studies that 'prove' alternative sources of energy won't work.

Meanwhile Norway, a country located further north than all of the United States except Alaska, gets 99% of its energy from renewable sources. 😳 They have set a goal that by 2025, all new vehicles will be zero emission, powered by either electricity or hydrogen.

And don't ever get me started on a certain president wanting to reopen the coal mines!! 🤬 🤬 If you know the history of the labour movement, you will know not only did coal cause air and water pollution, the coal barons 'owned' the people who worked for them. They were paid meagre wages, lived in company owned towns, and bought their goods at the company owned stores for inflated prices. The song 'Sixteen Tons' told the harsh truth: "St. Peter don't you call me, cuz I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store'! When the workers tried to unionize, many people died as the mine owners did everything possible to stop them. I can think of few industries with a worse track record in their treatment of workers, and in the amount of environmental damage they caused!

 

LOL, in the US, we can't keep the electric grid going in CA without electric vehicles. Rolling blackouts. What happens when we start charging autos? In Ohio, we still make electricity with coal. Yep. That's right, electric cars which require the mining of worse crap than coal will require more coal to use. And the vehicles, because of the batteries are so much heavier than gas powered engines, that it will use more energy. Electric, gas, whatever, Energy we not make, we convert, from potential to kinetic. We are not the energy makers. We do not make energy. We use it. We put it in forms that we can use. If you make cars that are 2x the mg of the current vehicles, they will use 2x the E. It's all physics.

Living where it's cold, no way will I ever buy an electric car. I don't want to be stuck in a traffic jam on an hour-drive home from work in a blizzard while my car is losing power. And if it does, then some deisel truck, carrying a gas generator will have to come and charge my vehicle. I know that if your little regular car battery is drained down and is left to freeze it don't work no more. What about these car batteries that cost as much as the vehicle. Wonder what happens to them. What happens if you come home from work and want to charge your car so you can go to work tomorrow, and the power goes out because of a rolling black out or something. Is that going to be a thing? Forget it. Maybe for a little country the size of one of our states, where folks work close to home, and maybe have train service to most work locations that might work. Might. We don't have that here. Here we don't have train service, bus service, taxi service. You live where I do, then you either have a gas-powered vehicle, or a horse and buggy.

 

LOL, in the US, we can't keep the electric grid going in CA without electric vehicles. Rolling blackouts. What happens when we start charging autos? In Ohio, we still make electricity with coal. Yep. That's right, electric cars which require the mining of worse crap than coal will require more coal to use. And the vehicles, because of the batteries are so much heavier than gas powered engines, that it will use more energy. Electric, gas, whatever, Energy we not make, we convert, from potential to kinetic. We are not the energy makers. We do not make energy. We use it. We put it in forms that we can use. If you make cars that are 2x the mg of the current vehicles, they will use 2x the E. It's all physics.

Living where it's cold, no way will I ever buy an electric car. I don't want to be stuck in a traffic jam on an hour-drive home from work in a blizzard while my car is losing power. And if it does, then some deisel truck, carrying a gas generator will have to come and charge my vehicle. I know that if your little regular car battery is drained down and is left to freeze it don't work no more. What about these car batteries that cost as much as the vehicle. Wonder what happens to them. What happens if you come home from work and want to charge your car so you can go to work tomorrow, and the power goes out because of a rolling black out or something. Is that going to be a thing? Forget it. Maybe for a little country the size of one of our states, where folks work close to home, and maybe have train service to most work locations that might work. Might. We don't have that here. Here we don't have train service, bus service, taxi service. You live where I do, then you either have a gas-powered vehicle, or a horse and buggy.

The best comment about electric cars I have read in a long time. And soo true

 

Meh. Who do we blame for that last ice age?

If we were going to be serious about getting rid of plastics, we'd get rid of disposable nappies. They can't be reused, they can't be recycled, and how many nappies does a baby go through every day? And......, there is a perfectly good all natural reusable alternative.

But.....

That would mean washing them, and the average person is just not going to do that. Most people could not care less about such things as climate change, recycling, use less plastic, less coal, etc.

A generation ago and the "average" person would actively lie about their age just to go and fight for their country. Todays average person likes to glue themselves to a road to protest this or that, whatever is trending at the moment, while at the same time they are blaming me for apparently ruining their planet. Or they like to storm into the restaurant where I am having an evening out and call me a killer because of the steak I am having.

So my dog poops where ever she likes. I always will pick it up. That's just common decency. I hate walking her through our local bush land only to see old dog poops, trash, beer bottles, but as I said, that's the average person for you.

Ohh... And her poop bags are plastic btw.

 

Hooooooooooeeeeyy [stuff I want to say as a professional biologist that would probably get me banned from this forum for being argumentive about highly political topics]

I just hope y'all keep an open mind when/if practical, safe solutions to fossil fuel emissions/plastic waste/renewable energy/habitat conservation/all the things become available. Yes, right now a lot of our solutions are imperfect but I am hopeful that we'll continue to make progress and reduce the overall impact of humanity on this planet and our fellow organisms.

 

Sooooooo, what I would have to say about this would get me banned also! Seems the more educated people are, the less common sense they have

 

Imperfect solutions, for example who were the short sighted people in the pacific northwest that insisted stores could only sell plastic bags and they had to be heavy duty plastic bags. Sure the bags say "use 150 time" but honestly, the got nasty and broken after only 2 or 3 uses. Or they piled up on closet floors because people forgot to bring them back to the store. So I ended up using heavy duty plastic to pick up dog poop or had to buy official dog poop bags. In the south I reuse those thin store bags for just about everything. I have a bunch of thick PNW bags that I'll bring back up there when we visit. And I'll try to remember to keep them in my vehicle.

When we lived in Maryland a few stores, like BJs had no bags. They let people take the shipping boxes to carry their purchases. I had a cooler and a few cloth bags that I kept in our truck so when I went to a place like Lydl or Aldis , I just put my things back into the cart and bagged them in the parking lot, never bringing those bags into the store. I shopped at just enough regular stores to keep me stocked in reusable bags to line small trash cans and pick up poop.

I went to a park one that had stocked their bag dispensers with plant based bags. Over the winter, even though they were dry, they degraded so that they fell apart as I tried to get them out of their boxes the following spring. I do remember another park that had installed PVC pipes with a hole at the top and a hole at the bottom and park users brought their left over store plastic bags and donated them to the park bag holders. They were never empty and it was a good inexpensive way to deal with the poop problem.

We need to use less plastics over all. We can use cloth bags over and over again but it they are full of products wrapped in excess plastics, well, we still need to find a better way to deal with that.

 

Imperfect solutions, for example who were the short sighted people in the pacific northwest that insisted stores could only sell plastic bags and they had to be heavy duty plastic bags. Sure the bags say "use 150 time" but honestly, the got nasty and broken after only 2 or 3 uses.

That's just silly! The reusable bags we are having to use now are cloth, and I've yet to have one wear out, though I do wash them now and then when they get dirty.

Back when we were using plastic, I would keep my bags and reuse them. I think I still have a couple in my car that haven't worn out, even though it's been more than a year since the stores stopped using them.

 

all I know that there are no easy answers. What looks like an improvement creates new issues. I heard podcast that reminded people that at one time London had a huge problem with Horse dung. The automobile solved that problem but created its own. Now people want to go electric (and we had an EV, great little car, but no longer the best choice for us) but do we even have enough raw materials to meet the demand? 75% of our Lithium comes from China! I've heard that we would run out of even common ores, like copper.
Our beaches, here, ban glass containers. I understand why, but when I see all the plastic washed up on shore, I wish they were glass instead, that break down to harmless bits over time. Anyone who can solve the problem without creating another in exchange could be rich!

 

all I know that there are no easy answers. What looks like an improvement creates new issues. I heard podcast that reminded people that at one time London had a huge problem with Horse dung. The automobile solved that problem but created its own. Now people want to go electric (and we had an EV, great little car, but no longer the best choice for us) but do we even have enough raw materials to meet the demand? 75% of our Lithium comes from China! I've heard that we would run out of even common ores, like copper.
Our beaches, here, ban glass containers. I understand why, but when I see all the plastic washed up on shore, I wish they were glass instead, that break down to harmless bits over time. Anyone who can solve the problem without creating another in exchange could be rich!

This is a good point, and one I thought about bringing up. Apparently some company recently found a huge deposit of rare earth minerals (the stuff used for lithium batteries and other renewable energy infrastructure) here in my little part of Montana, in the far upper end of our primary watershed, really pristine, beautiful place with lots of wildlife. Evidently it's one of the largest, purest deposits in the whole country. So there's of course huge interest in extracting it to reduce our dependence on China--a process which will produce mountains of toxic waste dangerously close to primary source of water for 50,000 Montana residents, and which feeds into the Columbia River Basin.

So yeah, definitely not a perfect solution. I'm still hopeful our species is smart enough to come up with alternatives.

Incidentally, I just spent an hour looking for a herd of elk I used to very reliably find in a particular area around my town. Over the years their numbers have dwindled and now I can't find them at all. Why? Because their habitat has been almost entirely converted to neighborhoods. The elk are gone. Sure, they're not an endangered species or anything, but they're getting squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces almost daily. I see the impact of our species every day. It kills me.

 

population is a tough nut to crack. I'm one of those people who would never want to live in a large city. I don't even visit them anymore unless I have to. But that means like minded folks are going to add to sprawl.
on another note

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a 'raft of life' for animals in the open ocean

Animals displaced hundreds of miles from shore are living on the pieces of plastic that float in the Pacific Ocean.

www.popsci.com

 

Some people certainly think that biodegradable poop bags are the answer and must magically disappear in hours since .... they throw them off the path into the long grass or woods.

We have blue box recycling for paper, cans, bottles and plastic as well as green bins for household organics. Even trying to buy smartly, we have a bag of plastic for recycling weekly, X number of bottles and cans but the green bin is easily twice as much as the actual garbage, that our entire family could put out only every 3-4 weeks.

Almost all of our grocery stores have banned plastic bags in favour of reusable plastic or mesh. Predictably, they are making them cheaper and cheaper so that they last far less than the math they use to defend them. And you still use the same amount of plastic bags for garbage except you new have to buy them.

Our virtue signalling government banned the plastic straws that the average family might use 0 of a week (not talking McDonalds etc) but allow single use plastic water bottles that often retail 24/$1.99 and fill entire blue boxes weekly. Coke and Pepsi said no!

 

Some people certainly think that biodegradable poop bags are the answer and must magically disappear in hours since .... they throw them off the path into the long grass or woods.

Yep. The people who believe in the Poop Fairy.

 

Our dogs have always done the majority of their pooping at home in the dog run. We use a pooper scooper and when the small bin is full, (with one dog that's maybe 3 or 4 poops) it's emptied into saved produce or Doordash bags and put in the trash.

I have roll of poop bags with me when I take Cava on hikes, those get tossed into garbage cans at the park, the same when we're out of town for tournaments. We never use them at home.

 

Ok so I guess I have no common sense left by now....

Bottom line I think is that we need to use less. Radical idea, eh? I try to make any trip to town multi duty. Feed bags get repurposed as trash bags or lawn waste bags. The purchased bags get reused several times - usually serve to deliver grass clippings to my neighbor's chickens. One quandry with animal feed is that bailing twine is now plastic. Unfortunately on one count, Osprey like it for their nests. It shouldn't be left available because chicks get tangled in it and trangle. So I have a great collection of plastic twine that I WILL do something with (there is a weaving technique I have in mind.)

My lawn is a fire-break, necessary because of where I live. It does use water. Maybe I have compensated for that by cutting down a lot of juniper trees. (Junipers suck water. If it is available, a juniper will use 40 gallons a day.) Fire retardent construction materials are a quandry because they are not going to decompose for a good long while. I tried to get wood windows for my new shed but they weren't available so I went with plastic. The company would have replaced them with wood ones at no charge once the wood became available but that would not have cut down on plastic.

I think it was something like 10 years ago that I bought a pair of jeans at a retail store that wasn't a junk store. What others toss out is amazing because I end up dressing quite OK on junk store clothes. Whoa, I'll stop my rant on waste/landfills and consumerism. Give y'all a break.

 

And let me add a thank you to the person who spoke about coal. I worked in SW Wyoming for several years. UP Coal Mines. Incredible history, lasting effects, black lung for miners, sink holes --- extractive industries in general --- OK what is encouraging about this discussion is that while we have offered no solutions, many of us are on-board with the issue.

 

To quote someone - so who do we blame for the last ice age?

Here's a graph of global temperature change. Yes, this is a cartoon, but the author of the cartoon is very well educated, and knows what he's talking about. He did considerable research before posting this. And sometime humor gets through to people when throwing facts at them doesn't! (I used to teach high school biology, before becoming a nurse...)

You will need to click on the image to enlarge it:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/earth_temperature_timeline.png?fbclid=IwAR1YADuva_qZN7PavLCSQCd9Fn02itDHP0i6i0J1z6IShfG5PHmKsCchgAg

 

Love that graph



Love that graph