Why our bags aren't compostable.

US industrial composting facilities won't take dog waste, and it isn't a capacity problem. It's a health one. Dog poop can carry parasites and bacteria that survive the process and end up in finished compost, which is a product people spread on vegetable gardens.

There's a second, dumber reason. Many facilities pull every plastic-looking bag off the sorting line, compostable or not, because at speed nobody can tell the difference. So a genuinely compostable bag often gets picked out and landfilled by the exact facility that could have composted it.

This got real enough that the Biodegradable Products Institute, the body that certifies compostable products in North America, stopped certifying dog waste bags for the US market. Their reasoning, roughly: there's no point setting a standard for something that can't be used as intended.

Compost needs oxygen. A landfill is engineered to do the opposite: compact the waste and seal it. What happens down there is anaerobic decomposition, without air.

Anaerobic decomposition makes methane. Landfill gas is roughly 50% methane, and methane traps at least 28 times more heat than CO₂ over a hundred years. Municipal landfills are the third-largest source of human-caused methane emissions in the country.

So the compostable bag either sits there inert for decades, with estimates starting around 75 years, or it breaks down and produces the worse gas. Neither of those is what the word on the box promised.

In 2014 the FTC warned 15 companies selling “oxodegradable” waste bags that their claims were likely deceptive, for the reason above: those bags need oxygen, and they're sold for a job that ends somewhere without any. The FTC's Green Guides treat an unqualified “biodegradable” claim as deceptive unless the thing fully breaks down within a year in the place it's actually thrown away.

We're not bringing this up to dunk on anyone. We're bringing it up because it's the clearest evidence that this isn't a matter of opinion.

They're not a scam everywhere. If you compost dog waste at home in a dedicated bin, not the one your tomatoes go in, a certified compostable bag is genuinely the correct purchase. Some Canadian municipalities accept pet waste in green bins. A handful of cities and dog parks run pet waste digester programs.

If you have access to one of those, use it, and buy the compostable bag. We mean that.

Our bags are 60% post-consumer recycled plastic. Post-consumer means it has already been plastic once: packaging that got collected and reprocessed rather than made from scratch.

That's a less romantic claim, and a smaller one. It doesn't make the bag disappear. What it does is reduce how much new plastic had to be made. A year of ours, at one dog and two pick-ups a day, is roughly 80 plastic bottles' worth of material that never had to be produced. That figure uses a 16.9 fl oz (10g) PET bottle as the reference, and the arithmetic is on the product page so you can run it against your own dog.

Recycled plastic in a landfill just sits there and behaves. In this specific situation, that's the point.

Our bags are not compostable, not biodegradable, and not the greenest object in your house.

That 60% is a compromise, not a ceiling we failed to clear. Recycled plastic has already been through heat and machinery once, and the more of it goes into a film, the weaker that film gets: it tears sooner and stretches less before it splits. So the recycled number and the strength pull against each other, and a bag that wins the first and loses the second helps nobody. A bag that rips is a bag you use two of. That is as far as we could push it and still hand you something that does the job. There are bags on the market with a higher percentage than ours. They made a different trade.

We think the honest position for this product is this: it's a small piece of plastic that has to survive one very specific job, it's going to landfill no matter what anybody prints on the box, so make it out of plastic that already existed and don't pretend otherwise.

If you care about this properly, and if you've read this far you probably do, the useful question was never which word is printed on the box. It's whether anything near you will actually take the bag. If something will, buy compostable and mean it. If nothing will, and for almost everyone in the US nothing will, then the only lever left is how much new plastic had to exist in the first place. That's the one we pull.