Sh*t happens and the need for poop bags

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My quest to pick an eco-friendly, affordable poop bag

When you have a Great Dane one of the first questions asked is “how much does he eat?” That question is usually followed with some comment about the size of the poop we have to pick up. Yes, big dog=big poop.

Good quality food does cut down on the size and frequency of what comes out the tail end but we still pick up poop 2-3 times per day. You can read more about my research for the what to feed our Danes in my Dog Food post.

In the end, you have to pick up what comes out and that unfortunately leads most of us to using plastic bags. I say unfortunately because once plastic is created it doesn’t go away. It gets smaller which turns out is causing problems by being ingested by animals at the base of the food chain which then travels back up the food chain (see footnote). But that is all for another blog, back to the topic of dogs and poop. If you walk your dog either in a city or on a trail you need poop bags, but how can you be gently on the environment at the same time?

I tend to over research these things, it’s my science background. However, there is plenty to research. It seems like every dog blog has a post about poop bags and then there are the company pages and the ASTM standards (American Society for Testing and Materials)…. so I’ll try to keep this simple for my own sanity as well as yours.

Biodegradable

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride

There are plenty of “biodegradable” poop bags on the market but turns out that doesn’t always mean what you think it means. I got to wondering when I would see the labeling “biodegradable, except in California”. California might seem to be on a different planet at times but we really aren’t. It has to do with the words biodegradable, degradable and decomposable. California outlawed those terms because of the abuse and greenwashing associated with them. In general, unregulated guidelines allow package labeling which can mislead the consumer into thinking they are being earth-friendly when they actually aren’t. The term biodegradable is so general as to be almost useless. The Dog People posted a helpful article about biodegradable on their blog.

Materials used for poop bags:

bioplastic: made from natural materials (i.e. corn starch)
biodegradable plastics: made from petrochemicals (i.e. petroleum) designed to break down faster (i.e. into little pieces of plastic)
eco/recycled plastics: plastic made from other plastic products
PVA (polyvinyl alcohol): synthetic polymer which is water soluble (i.e. detergent pod packaging)

What are the green options for poop bags?

There are a lot of options which is why this post took me much longer than it should have, it was that research rabbit hole I dove down again.

Products you will find when searching for “environmentally friendly”:

plant based resins and vegetable oils = bioplastics
EPI plastic or oxo-biodegradable = additives cause the plastic to more quickly fragment into extremely small pieces, some of that greenwashing labeling
recycled materials = plastic bag with cardboard core and box
PVA = flushable, Flush Puppies Doodie Bags is the only brand I know of

Look for ASTM6400 and EN13432 (European standard) certification of compostability. Don’t be fooled by ASTM 6954 and ISO 14855, those are the testing procedures for certification and don’t measure a products pass/fail status at compostability.

There are a number of brands that are ASTM6400 and EN13432 compliant. Yes, they are more expensive than traditional petroleum based plastics and they also have a limited shelf life. It is up to you to weigh the upfront financial costs with the long term environmental ones.

My choice (for now)

As mentioned above, I had to set affordability aside to be eco-friendly. I used to buy 900+ plastic bags at a time now I’m buying 200 since compostable bags have a limited shelf life. BioBag is the brand I settled on. They have been around for a long time and are top of many other blogger’s lists.

Update

When the compostable bags I had ordered were not available anymore switched to a corn-based bag. I’m putting them in the trash anyway so compostablility isn’t very important but I still want to reduce my use of plastic.

Footnote: If you want more information about the affects of plastic on our planet check out this website and look for the film Plastic Oceans on Netflix.

PS: