Environmentally Safe Cat Litter

Photo from Flickr user xeni (it’s actually a cake!)

In a previous post here on Take Care of Your Cat, At-A-Glance Cat Litter, Ashley covered the pros and cons of various types of cat litter. What also may interest some people are the environmental concerns of cat litter. From Slate’s Dirty Dogs and Carbon Cats:

You’re better off using kitty litter instead—but be careful about which kind you use. Most is made of bentonite clay or its cousin, fuller’s earth; both materials are extracted through surface mining, an environmentally taxing process. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, about a quarter of all bentonite mined in the United States and over half of all fuller’s earth—nearly 2.5 million metric tons a year between the two—is used as an absorbent for pet waste. Mining companies claim they can regrow any vegetation removed during the extraction process, but the scope of reclamation projects for Wyoming bentonite suggests that the effects of strip mining can be significant. Meanwhile, because the litter is nonbiodegradable, there’s no place for it to go but the landfill.

A better option would be litters that come from recycled newspapers, wheat, corn cobs or reclaimed sawdust, assuming you don’t want to go about making your own. These litters—along with the cat waste—can be composted, as long as you use the right precautions, and they provide a good use of recycled material. If you use liners for your litter box, you can find ones made from biodegradable plastic. (Some owners complain about their cats’ reactions to green litters, so try them on a small scale first and see what happens.)

Disposal of cat litter also has some environmental and safety issues. You can not compost cat waste as you can with dog waste due to Toxoplasmosis, and there has been evidence that flushing cat waste down the toilet is harming sea otters because of the very same parasite. This parasite can be a danger to humans, but if you wash your hands after cleaning your cat’s litter there should be relatively no chance of catching it.

Further Reading
Toxoplasmosis: An Important Message for Cat Owners
Kitty litter and the environment
List of Eco-Friendly Cat Litter