Whenever I take our dogs Jessie and Hunter for a walk, I create little plastic-wrapped stool samples. Time capsules of poop, preserved in the landfill for future archaeologists to find. My rueful shout-out to distant generations.
Like many San Franciscans, my family and I are fervent recycler-composters and passionate dog lovers. And that’s the source of our angst. In order to be good citizens with canines, we scoop, bag and throw plastic into the garbage. And it’s little consolation that the bags are getting a second use. In fact, now that the city has banished plastic bags from grocery stores and chain pharmacies, our daily dog ritual feels even dirtier — like we’re trafficking in contraband.
According to the SF Chronicle, animal refuse makes up nearly four percent of San Francisco’s residential waste — almost as much as disposable diapers. For those of us with both children and dogs, this news inflicts a double dose of self-doubt and lifestyle shame.
On the diaper front, we like to think that we’ve evolved. The first time around, my family had eyes only for baby. If Hummer and McLaren had partnered on a co-branded paramilitary stroller, we probably would have missed the environmental atrocity angle and debated rims and grillwork.
But by the time our second child arrived 15 months ago, we were sufficiently awake to tackle the inconvenient truth about diapers. After sifting through mountains of opinion surrounding the eco-impact of paper vs. cloth, we ponied up a few hundred dollars for the Cadillac of washable baby wrappers — Fuzzi Bunz.
More than a mere diaper, Fuzzi Bunz is a closed-loop, multi-phased “solution.” They come with a hanging cloth diaper “pail,” fleece wipes to be spritzed before use with tea-tree oil, and the greenest possible laundry detergent. These things are so popular that craigslist and eBay host a bustling secondhand market. Yes, a market for secondhand diapers.
All joking aside, though, I’ve got to believe that Fuzzi Bunz washed in a cold cycle and air dried are better friends to the earth than their disposable cousins, with all those plastic closures and space-age absorbent crystals. And of course, there’s serious money to be saved.
Feeling triumphant and guilt free, we provided a little staff tutorial when my daughter started daycare at five months. But after a week, with the honeymoon firmly in the rearview, the staff pushed back. So we slunk off to Rainbow Grocery and began supplying the school with Seventh Generation disposables each week. Thus, our diaper double life began — cloth at home and throwaways at school.
Here’s the real kicker, though: Our daughter arrives at school each morning wearing cloth Fuzzi Bunz, and at pickup, the morning’s cloth wrapper sits waiting, often with the day’s first production still inside — and, of course, wrapped in a plastic bag. (Who says San Francisco is short on irony?)
But I digress from the dogs. At the household level, mitigating the impact of the thrice-daily scoop and toss has proven more elusive than our diaper detente. And despite the city’s historic step to ban plastic shopping bags, dog waste seems to defy big programmatic answers.
Convincing newspapers to switch to more expensive compostible bags is a tough sell. And worse yet, some experts say that biodegradable bags could lead to greenhouse gasses when the poop breaks down without oxygen in the landfill.
Adding droppings to the green bin isn’t the solution either. Even though we heat our citywide compost to 140 degrees and kill off most pathogens, dog waste creates, shall we say, perception problems. The vineyards buying the city’s compost definitely don’t want consumers thinking about poop as they sip glasses of buttery chardonnay — even if, in composting, the stuff eventually becomes safe.
Some say we should retrieve our quadrupeds’ calling cards from where they fall and take them back home to our own toilets. But we’re not very good at cleansing human waste in our treatment facilities — just ask all those fish on Prozac. So dog waste would only complicate our sewage. And sadly a city pilot program to generate energy by sending poop from parks to a methane-digester hasn’t gotten off the ground yet.
But wait! Always a jump ahead, our neighbors to the North offer a simple, step-by-step process to compost dog waste at home. Instructions appear on CityFarmer.org, a web site maintained by Canada’s Office of Urban Agriculture. Just punch holes into a small garbage pail with a lid, bury it, throw in some septic booster from your hardware store and you’re ready to enrich any non-vegetable planting bed.
So for the time being, maybe we shouldn’t be thinking global or acting local on this one. We should just narrow the focus and cultivate our own gardens.
San Francisco writer John Perry is a grateful beneficiary of Norcal Golden Retriever Rescue and Golden Gate Gordon Setter Rescue.