RECYCLING DOG SHIT!!!!
A group of upstate New York dog owners thinks it has a can-do plan to profitably compost the tons of dog doo left behind by the roughly 50 000 canines that use the city's pooch park each year.
If their pilot project is successful, the Tompkins County Dog Owners Group and Cayuga Compost hope to market usable compost within the next two or three years.
More importantly, finding a use for the billions of pounds of pooch poop produced yearly in the United States could also lead to a significant reduction in the amount of waste material sent to landfills, said Leon Kochian, a spokesman for TC DOG, the not-for-profit volunteer group involved in funding the project.
"There was a large Dumpster at the park, and it was just always overflowing with plastic bags of dog poop. The amount was unbelievable," said Kochian, a Cornell University biology professor who owns a yellow Labrador retriever.
"Ithaca has a reputation as a green community. ... It made sense to us to find a way to compost and spare the landfill from all the plastic bags," Kochian said.
Dog and cat waste contain parasites and pathogens that make them unsuitable as compost for vegetable gardens and topsoil and can run off into local waterways and diminish water quality, said Cary Oshins, an assistant program director for the US Composting Council. Composted pet waste can be used for deep-fill or other purposes.
A handful of dog parks in the US provide on-site composting receptacles but none has tried moving it offsite to a large-scale composting facility in a commercial venture, according to DogParkUSA.com, a national dog park Web site.
But large-scale composting has worked at the Parc Notre Dame de Grace in Montreal, Canada, where municipal officials have been composting dog waste since 2004 and annually divert about a ton of dog waste and 7 000 plastic bags from the local landfill.
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2 comments:
I think more people would be willing to pick up their dog poop and recycle it here if there was a program like this.
What I hate is: the people who put their dog's poop in a plastic bag, then through it on someone lawn or leave it on the ground. That is so wrong because if they just left it in the grass where the dog pooped, it would have become fertilizer. Instead, people litter a bag or poop and it just lays there for weeks. SO GROSS! I would pick it up, mabe if I didn't have OCD. So, I can't.
It all depends on the size of the dog...If one has Irish Wolfhounds the piles of "poop" gather very quickly.
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