San Francisco has an ambitious goal of achieving zero waste by 2020 — the city already diverts 80 percent of its garbage from the landfill. Dog poop, at four percent of the waste stream, is one of those vexing fractions standing in the way of getting to zero.
Most commercial composters are already processing dog and cat waste that gets swept up in municipally collected yard trimmings.
Flushing it could be an option — the EPA even recommends it. You can buy special bags designed to be flushed down the drain. But as Macy points out, sewage treatment facilities use a lot of chemicals and energy to remove contaminants from human waste; adding our pets’ waste could burden some systems and would pose an extra drain on water when there’s a drought, as Californians are currently suffering.
Maybe the problem is that we are looking at poop as waste, rather than what it really is: a resource that could — and should — be recycled for compost or energy.
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