Dogs and Water Quality

The U.S. Dog Population equals the number of folks in California, Texas and New York combined! For real.

There are 78 million dogs in the U.S. today. They eat. Then they eliminate a pound or more of poop every day. This adds up to a staggering amount of waste.  Picture this: The 3.6 billion pounds of dog poop produced in a year can fill 800 hundred footballs fields, one foot deep! You can see we aren't talking about a small nuisance here.

Methods, Myths and Malarkey

Plastic does not make perfect: The most frequently used method of getting rid of dog poop is by collecting it in a plastic bag, storing it in a garbage can for several days, then sending it to a landfill in the weekly trash pick-up. Some believe it is a "natural" fertilizer and soil nutrient and leave it on the ground where it breaks down and is absorbed into the soil.

Hiring someone to do the dirty work doesn't solve the problem: Some use pooper-scooper services that do the same thing homeowners do by sending it to landfills. The difference is scooper services deal with much larger quantities. Plus, they don't come daily and they cost a pretty penny.

Cow manure, dog manure, what's the difference? The difference lies in the gut. Cows are herbivores and roam thousands of acres.  Dogs are carnivores like us and live in small spaces where waste becomes super-concentrated. Composting dog poop and using it to fertilize your garden veggies is rolling the parasitic dice. Unless the composting temperature reaches 165 degrees and stays there for a good five days, the bacteria are not completely obliterated and are free to multiply and contaminate the food you plan to harvest and eat.

Let it decompose naturally as Mother Nature intended. Mother Nature frowns on this idea because feces transport millions of microorganisms that can harm the earth, water, flora, fauna and us. Leaving the waste to decompose and "nourish the soil" is a misguided belief. Disintegration of feces is quick, but true decomposition takes a long time and the microorganisms don't just disappear. The whole story is that as poop is slowly breaking down, it is carried off by rainwater or runoff and leaches into the water table and sewer drains where it dumps into streams, rivers, lakes and oceans. Beaches close. Aquatic plant life and organisms, fish and mammals are harmed or killed by this contaminated runoff. Mother Nature does not give this method her stamp of approval.

Diamonds are forever. So are plastic bags! If you choose to bag the waste in plastic and send it to a landfill, chances are that in 500-1000 years that bag, made of high or low density polyethylene film, will still be struggling to disintegrate. In the meantime, it adds millions of tons of junk to our landfills. Although this method is very common, you can see it's not a good choice. We do it, though, because we don't have any easier, safer options. That is not until the PowerLoo arrived!

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