Green In Oak Park

Hi, my name is Ellie, and I’m a dog. I live a very hard life, as you can see.

Can you believe my parents make me hold down the couch like this, sometimes for hours at a time?

But I digress. I’m actually here to talk about a somewhat embarrassing subject, and that’s, well, dog poop. Shh, don’t tell anyone! It’s kind of gross, and I like to pretend I am a perfect angel who never does anything gross. Except when I do something gross, and then my cover is blown. My mom – that’s the lady who writes this blog – is trying to figure out a better way to dispose of the poop. There are lots of options, but none of the ones she’s thought of are ideal.

She says she can continue picking it up with plastic bags and putting the plastic bags in the weekly garbage, but that isn’t very green. It means a lot of plastic bags and a lot of things that sit in a landfill and never biodegrade. She could use biodegradable bags, like these or these, but they would still stay in the plastic garbage bags and never become part of the soil. The people who pick up the garbage say that if they aren’t in the big plastic bags, they explode and it’s yucky.

We do have a Doggie Dooley in the yard.

It’s sticking up more than most Doggie Dooleys, but under that, there is a deep hole. You open the hatch, put the poop in, and sometimes add enzymes and water. Then it breaks down. But here’s the problem – if I go in the yard, it has to be picked up right away or it can’t go in the dooley because of flies, and if I go while we’re on a walk, it has to be picked up with a plastic or biodegradable bag and put in the dooley. Neither one of those kinds of bags can go in the Doggie Dooley. My mom says you shouldn’t ask her how she knows about the biodegradable bags. Something about having to fish them out with a coat hanger because they weren’t breaking down, but I don’t know exactly what that means. She said some bad words about it, so it must not be good.

There are tutorials on the web on making your own doggie waste composting system.

But my mom is concerned that they would have the same problems as the Doggie Dooley.

There are also composters that use worms. My mom thinks they’re kind of expensive and isn’t sure she can put the biodegradable bags in with them because you’re not supposed to put food items in a pet poop composter, and the bags are made of things like corn. But maybe using the bags and putting the poop in without the bags is the best solution, even though she’d still have to throw out the biodegradable bags. Then the compost can go on flowers and grass, but nothing people eat in the garden. She says people have to be careful because of pathogens in dog poop. What are pathogens?

Does anyone have any ideas for my mom? Thanks in advance. I should get back to holding down the couch now so that I can earn my keep around here.