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With a name like “Tree Hugger.com” I expected some good tips to come from this great green-living website, and they delivered. There are several good posts about green living with a pet and these three tips came from a post offering 15 great tips for living green with a dog. Check out these tips and then hop over to treehugger.com for the other dozen.
Give them sustainable goods Your furry friends can get in on some saving-the-planet goodness, too–and have plenty of fun–with toys made from recycled materials or sustainable fibers (sans herbicides or pesticides) such as hemp. A hemp collar (with matching leash) is a rocking accessory for a tree-hugging mutt. These days, you can even get pet beds made with organic cotton or even recycled PET bottles.
Compost their poop American dogs and cats create 10 million tons of waste a year, and no one knows where it’s going, according to Will Brinton, a scientist in Mount Vernon, Maine, and one of the world’s leading authorities on waste reduction and composting.
Most of our pets’ poop either winds up in a landfill purgatory, where it’s embalmed practically forever in plastic bags, or sits on the ground until the next rainstorm washes it into the sewer where it can drift on down to rivers and beaches. You can compost the poop–just don’t use it with your vegetable garden, because the compost doesn’t heat up enough to kill pathogens such as E. coli., which could contaminate your homegrown produce and land up in your (very unhappy) belly.If you have room in your backyard, you can bury an old garbage bin (note: far away from your vegetable garden) to use as a pet-waste composter. Or check out the Doggie Dooley. The makers of the Doggy Dooley also sell an enzymatic “Super Digester Concentrate” for your backyard pet septic system.
Offset your pet Maybe Scruffy will only drink water from an electric-powered water fountain, or perhaps you have a self-cleaning litter box from before you went green–we all have corpses buried in our backyards. Why not purchase green tags, otherwise known as renewable energy credits, to offset your pets’ carbon emissions. Heck, buy ’em for the whole family so no one feels left out. Or better yet, check if your state sells green power so you and your furry compatriots can go carbon neutral.”
If you like these three tips for living green with a dog I’m sure you’ll appreciate the other 12 that TreeHugger.com offers. And, as always, we’d love it if you’d share your own personal tips for green living with your dog.
