Dogloo.

As a responsible dog owner you probably carry a bag and pick up your dog’s poop. If you’re lucky, the bag — plastic or paper — will be biodegradable. If you’re unlucky, and have concerns about the environment, you’ll worry about the tonnes of poop-filled plastic bags ending up at the rubbish dump.

At home, I installed a Dog Loo. It’s a bin where the poop breaks down and the waste water seeps out into the surrounding soil.

It works fairly well, now I’ve located it in a suitable part of the garden and once I’d dug a large enough hole for it.

While we’re out though, I use plastic bags to pick up and then drop the bag in a rubbish bin. And worry about the mountains of poop at the rubbish tip.

In Ithaca, New York, USA, they’re trying a different approach — composting. Leon Kochian, a professor of plant biology at Cornell was an instigator:

This year, with Mr. Kochian’s nudging, one of the city’s dog parks — part of the Allan H. Treman Marine State Park — became a dog waste composting park.

Special corn-based bags, made by the Biobag Company, based in Florida, are available at several stations in the park. Dog owners put the bag and its contents into large bins near the park’s entrances, which are removed once a week by a company called Cayuga Compost.

[Via : Ithaca’s Pioneers of Dog Waste Composting - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com.]

They don’t yet know how the composting will work out, so it’s something to keep an eye on.

Regardless, though, the idea of corn-based bags is interesting — unless of course they’re made of corn that should have been used for food …