Cats and the Environment I: The Litter Question

I was talking to my boss last week about her cats. It was originally a discussion about the composter I want to buy (which she has and likes [though she says it does smell a bit when you open it]), but grew into a discussion of recycling here in the office and at home and that led to the thing I do that annoys me most, ecologically speaking: throwing out the cat litter.

We have two cats, both indoor-exclusive, and we live in a condo high-rise with some very strict rules. One of them is that you must not toss bags of kitty litter down the trash chute. (That's pretty common sense, actually--bags do not stay intact while hurtling 30 floors through a small tube to their death in the garbage room, no matter what anyone tells you. Litter Bomb? No thanks.) The building's answer is to do a daily trash run: kitty litter bags are left in the trash room on our floor and maintenance comes by in the freight elevator and adds it to the pile of kitty litter bags they already have. It cuts down on the possibility of a litter bomb, so this rule, too, is all to the good.

Not to the good? I cannot reuse plastic grocery sacks to bag the litter. And it must be double bagged. So I end up spending extra money to buy small trash bags and then double wrap the kitty litter to ensure that it never ever sees a molecule of oxygen with which to decompose.

Annoying. And again, I mention that we have two cats. Who create a lot of smelly litter. In a high-rise building with decent but not brilliant cross-ventilation, I have to scoop the litter boxes (plural) every single day and still there is the problem of a teensy bit of stink in my oh-so-sensitive nose. Baking soda mixed into the litter helps, but the odor isn't the only problem.

I have allergies. Big, bad, killer allergies. And every single day, scooping that clay clumping litter is killing my lungs a little bit more. Yes, I know that there has never been a clinical study that shows that clumping litter is dangerous for anyone's health (but I kind of think that's just because they haven't bothered to study it), but the fact remains that I kick up an awful lot of dust scooping those things out and that does my allergies no good at all--can't imagine burying in the dust is great for the cats, come to think of it.

And the creation of the litter does no good to the earth, either. Conventional cat litters use clay, which is usually found some 30-40 feet underground on clay-containing mountainsides. Easiest way to get to it? Skim off the 30-40 feet of topsoil and growth above it and collect the clay. The result is a lopped-off mountainside (we had one where I was a kid--they're finally rehabilitating it now, decades later) that increases flood damage for the land below it and is generally an ecological disaster. It is so time for a change.

At first blush, biodegradable cat litters look like a fine idea. They are often made from things like leftover pine branches after a tree has been felled by the lumber companies or from corn husks and cobs left over from grain extraction (not 100% green, but at least it uses up the stuff no one wants). They rarely have anything chemical added to them and are, by all accounts, very good at controlling odors. And they biodegrade! They break down when you're done with them! Sounds perfect.

In actual fact, they are brilliant for people who have outside composters or large compost heaps that generate enough heat to kill all the bacteria that teem through feline waste. For someone like me--who will be double-bagging the dang stuff in air-blocking plastic, so it can be thrown in a landfill, which is, itself, an almost completely anaerobic environment--biodegradable litter only provides me with a product that was slightly less earth-killing to produce.

Flushable litters offer a good solution for me. There are a number of organic and/or natural brands out there, with varying textures, so moving your cat from one cat litter to another might be a little easier if the two feel basically the same. They don't really cost any more than the clays and might actually be more cost effective because you use less of them (supposedly--we'll see what happens in Chez Peaceable).

The basic truth is that I don't have a properly ventilated space for a certified animal-waste-processing composter (they suggest these only be placed outside because they smell regardless), and I'm sick to death of A) having to take my litter out to the trash room at a specific time to make sure it doesn't smell up the hall while it's waiting to be picked up, and B) throwing away hundreds of pounds of earth-damaging clay litter. I'm just starting my first foray into trying to get my older cat to use it. This should be fun.

NOTE FOR OWNERS OF OUTDOOR CATS: If you have an indoor-outdoor or outdoor-exclusive cat, your animal may be exposed to toxoplasmosis, a parasite which is not fun--it is the reason why pregnant women are told not to clean cat boxes, because the risk to the fetus if the mother contracts toxo is very, very high.

For this reason, you should probably find a different way to dispose of your kitty litter than flushing it down the toilet. Regional water treatment plants don't screen for toxo and it could end up in the water supply or, more likely, in the lakes, rivers, and oceans. Composting is the best bet there, as the heat of composting should kill off the parasite. Also, taking your cat to the vet and having them tested for toxo periodically is a healthy thing to do anyway. If you or your partner is pregnant or plans to become pregnant, for the love of the unborn babies, please test your cat for toxo. Birth defects are bad.

Change Sucks: but the results are fun (sometimes)

Living more frugally when in debt or overshoot is a sane and moral choice. The more of us who make this choice, the faster the collective transformation will go. We are at a crossroads. Disaster is not inevitable, but we need to change.
--Vicki Robin
Learn more about Your Money or Your Life and the Financial Integrity movement

I hate change.

Seriously. Change is exhausting and scary and difficult and I don't like it one bit.

The fact that change brought me the love of my life, a new place to call home, and maybe even some sense of peace (sometimes) is really quite beside the point. Change sucks.

But change is the only way to live--each of us is conceived, is born, lives, and dies eventually of something. It's all change.

Now, you can try to make change less painful in an awful lot of ways. You can work as hard as you can, sacrificing everything in the pursuit of something to make the change "worth it"--accrue tons of money so that you can always "have enough" and never have to worry. You can concentrate on saving the world--spend all your time sacrificing for the greater good; stop eating meat, fruit, whatever is the environmental baddie of the day; stop using plastic, aluminum, steel, wood, air; stop using the internet, the television, the car, the bike, your shoes--making sure that future generations can enjoy the earth (because you didn't).

In other words, you can try to take control of a fundamentally uncontrollable situation, hoping to make yourself feel safer.

But the truth is, you'll never feel safe, and I'd posit that life isn't about feeling safe anyway--at least not in that way. Life is about living, which is one of those hopelessly hokey things people put on bumper stickers, but it's true.

The problem with life being about living is that everyone has a different idea of what "living" entails. Is living having a fancy car and a fancy house and eating at five star restaurants every night? Is it acquiring as much "stuff" as you can get, so that you can say "I have enough to live on if everything collapses"? Is either of these ways of life fundamentally wrong--or right--for anyone and everyone?

The world itself will eventually make this determination for all of us. Currently, we as a species are living like we've got four or five spare planets tucked away, just waiting for us to pull them out of mothballs once we've used up the resources on this one. I found it interesting that the hundreds of thousands who jammed the Washington Mall to watch Barack Obama advocate change and a turning away from childish things managed to leave 120 tons of trash in their wake. This is not change I can believe in.

Eventually, the world will stop us itself. Crops fail every year, for a variety of reasons, and we look to technology to stop these disasters. We engineer crops that withstand a certain plant virus--then grow hectare after hectare of them, making them vulnerable to some other plague. We create new pesticides to stop this plague, killing off beneficial bacteria whose job it is to keep plague #3 in check. We "reintroduce" said bacteria to the soil, further disturbing the balance... It goes on and on and eventually, the earth is going to win and we're not going to be able to grow anything on that land, because it just plain needs time to heal.

We do much the same with every resource we have, but here's a thought: What if we, for starters, used less resources? This is not to say that we don't actually need to feed the billions of people on this planet, but what if we decided that we didn't need lemons from Florida in the dead of winter in the northern midwest (and yes, I'm talking about myself here)? That would mean less gas used to get the lemons from there to here, less monoculture in the agriculture landscape there, and more support of the farmers here in the midwest, who grow a mean winter cabbage and a variety of other winter greens that will satisfy my vitamin C requirements admirably.

What if, instead of using acres and acres of farmland for endless crops of corn to be used for ethanol, we instead stopped driving quite so much? Less driving, less ethanol, more room for food crop. And what if we as consumers were a bit more diverse and discriminating in our choice of foodstuffs? The farmer who once grew only one type of corn on his 150-acre farm could now grow five or ten different crops, rotating his crops in and out of each field and increasing the growing power and stability of the ecology of his own local soil. At the same time, he'd increase the nutritional content of the local diet and make sure that people could satisfy themselves with local food, using fewer food miles and coming back full circle to driving less, using less ethanol/gasoline/electricity, and improving the local agriculture.

No Impact Man posted a blog entry recently in which he commented that "we [environmentalists] should joke around more." I love both the cartoon and the sentiment. Because the flip side of the ethical and environmental snarl I've just written about is the joy of living well.

Now, living well can definitely mean spending $300 on one meal for two (say, your Valentine's Day blowout). I'm not into spending that much for a meal, myself--but don't ask me how much I spend on the mortgage to my beautiful condo on the beach. I spend my money on housing, because I "need" to see the water. Which is also living.

Living well can also mean spending a rainy day inside on the couch with a cup of tea and a good book. Heck, you don't even need to have bought that book--that's what libraries are for! Now, you can think about where that tea came from, where the cup came from, where the library got the book and how much, ecologically-speaking, it cost to make it, or you can just let go of your eco-guilt for a minute and enjoy the fact that you have a roof over your head and a good book in your lap.

And the next day, maybe you can remember how nice that day was--a day when the most consuming thing you did was, maybe, turned on the stove to heat some water and the light to see the print when it got dark, and think "maybe that's a good way to live more often than not."

Maybe buying your child fewer toys and offering him more attention is a good way to live. Maybe making a homemade meal with local foods you never even knew your area had is a good way to live. Maybe walking to the store that's only a mile away and not buying more than you can carry home is a good way to live. More often than not.

And if that change in thought--and change is hard--saves some money, or some resources, or some stress... Then maybe change doesn't need to suck quite so much all the time.

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Today, you get an ecological link, just because it's Friday!

• A Skyscraper Grows in New York City: The Vertical Farm Project is researching the sustainability and feasibility of building high rise gardens in metropolitan areas. The result could be a decrease in average food miles, a greater connection between the city dwellers and their food, and even the possibility of farms that not only supply their own power and water, but give some back to the community, as well! This project is, in my mind, the next building I want shooting up in my backyard!