You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
Hell is shopping for eco poop bags.
As much as I’m aware that blaming the climate crisis on individual consumer choices is a favorite smokescreen of large corporations and fossil fuel companies, it still totally kills me to buy single-use plastic bags. So when my household recently ran out of the 900 black disposable litter bags we’d bought on Wirecutter’s recommendation eons ago, I decided to be a Good Person and replace them with the most environmentally friendly option I could find. I mean, how hard could it be?
Hoo boy.
What started out as a naïve quest to find the greenest pet waste receptacle has become my Joker origin story. It’s turned me into Mark Ruffalo in Dark Water, except instead of taking on Dupont, I’m hounding companies with names like The Original Poop Bag and Doggy Do Good for the chemical makeup of their “green” bags. I’ve been red-pilled on advanced recycling. And, worst of all, I still haven’t actually bought a replacement — because the entire “green,” “biodegradable,” “plant-based,” “compostable” pet waste bag industry is built on misdirections, half-truths, and outright lies.
This might seem like a ridiculous thing to have spent my time obsessing over (and I don’t entirely disagree with you). But the greenwashing and obfuscation around these bags is part of a bigger story. Plastics are the fossil fuel industry’s last stand. The renewable energy transition, albeit in fits and starts, is here. Seeing the writing on the wall, companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are heavily investing in petrochemicals, which are used to make plastic and are expected to make up half of oil demand growth between now and 2050, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). As Armco president and CEO Amin Nasser has reassured his cohorts, oil demand from petrochemicals is expected to remain high “no matter which energy transition scenario plays out.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
This story starts with much cuter villains: my cats.
Meet the adorable antiheroes of this story, Marinka and Virginia:
This whole piece is just an excuse to show you a picture of my cats.Jeva Lange/Heatmap
These two cutie pies don’t know it, but they diligently contribute to the 5.1 million tons of feces produced by America’s dogs and cats every year. One estimate of the dog sector alone found that disposing of all that waste adds some 500 million single-use bags to U.S. landfills annually.
The evils of single-use plastic bags have already been drilled into most of our heads by now: They take years to break down and when they do, they don’t decompose but rather turn into tiny microplastics that end up in the soil, waterways, food chain, and even our bloodstreams and breast milk. There is one seemingly great and trendy way to get around this: compostable bags!
Alas, if something sounds too good to be true, it is. For one thing, the “compostable” claims made by eco-friendly pet companies are wildly misleading. Though brands like to imply that their bags decompose and disappear like any other yard waste, these products only break down within a year under the extremely specific conditions of a commercial composting facility — very, very few of which even accept pet waste in the first place. As a result, the FTC has flagged that “compostable claims for these products are generally untrue.”
A "compostable" poop bag available on Chewy.com...Chewy.com
...and why you should always read the fine print.Chewy.com
Companies love to exploit consumers’ lack of knowledge around these terms and processes, though, and are mostly free to do so since the language isn’t strongly regulated. Often brands will brag that their compostable bags meet the “ASTM D6400 standard,” which just means they meet the industrial composting standard — again, pretty useless for us in this context. (Touting the ASTM D6400 standard is also often a way for brands to hide that their bags are made with virgin fossil fuels … more on that soon).
The bigger question when it comes to composting pet waste is, do we even want to? Dogs and cats are meat eaters, which means their poop contains parasites and bacteria like roundworms and hookworms, which can last for years in the soil and even be passed onto humans if used as a fertilizer for edible plants. While maybe this doesn’t sound like it could be that big of a problem, it is: “A study by the Bureau of Sanitation found that 60% of the bacteria in a Marina Del Rey, [California,] waterway was because of animals, domesticated and feral,” the Los Angeles Times reports. Gross.
This is one time you’ll ever hear me say that dog people have it better, though. Done correctly, dog owners actually can home compost dog waste if they’re so inclined. That said, a major downside of compostable bags is that they seem to lead some people to the impression that they can litter trails and parks with their “green” bags since the bags will eventually “go away.” As previously discussed: No, they won’t.
Cat waste, however, never basically should end up in your garden: Felines carry the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which can be passed onto humans via compost but has been found to kill wildlife, including the sea otters in California. “Toxoplasma infections contribute to the deaths of 8 percent of otters that are found dead, and is the primary cause of death in 3 percent,” The New York Times explains. While feral cats used to be blamed for spreading the parasite, new evidence shows house cats almost certainly are, too — through their waste.
So compostable pet waste bags are out. As one municipality put it, dog and cat poop should be treated like what it is: not a fertilizer, but a pollutant. That means it needs to be sequestered, one way or another, in a landfill.
Just going to nip this one in the bud. For the same reason that composting pet waste isn’t advisable due to parasites and bacteria in four-legged meat-eaters’ feces, flushable pet waste bags and litter aren’t a safe or responsible choice, either.
Many waste treatment facilities don’t kill Toxoplasma, so putting cat poop in the toilet just expedites its journey into your local waterway. Indeed, in responding to an utterly unhinged email I sent them about cat waste, the California Association of Sanitation Agencies confirmed that “the only thing that should be flushed is human waste and toilet paper.”
Biodegradable pet waste bags are what radicalized me.
At first glance, these bags appear to be the best option. A number of them come on the recommendation of the sustainability website Treehugger. The product websites usually feature blogs full of reassuring information about how harmful plastic waste is, or boast 1% for the Planet certifications, or mention something about being made of cornstarch. Even the bags are green!
And almost all of them, despite their lofty claims, are made using virgin fossil fuels.
Polybutylene Adipate Terephthalate, or “PBAT,” is a biodegradable plastic made from the petrochemicals butanediol, purified terephthalic acid (PTA), and adipic acid. Translation: Fossil fuels must be extracted in order to make any bag that contains PBAT, which is virtually all of them.
Companies are exceptionally sneaky about this, though. Some of the brands boast outright about using PBAT as a traditional plastic alternative, likely assuming customers have no idea what the acronym means and won’t bother looking it up. Yet as Alice Judge, a former veterinarian and co-founder of the U.K.-based sustainable pet website Pet Impact, found in her own investigation, PBAT rarely makes up less than 60% of these supposedly “plant-based” pet waste bags. “There is some really concerning greenwashing and outright lying” going on in the industry, she told me. “We’ve found brands that are very big, reputable brands even saying explicitly ‘100% plant-based’ and in the same sentence saying ‘made from cornstarch and PBAT.’”
"Zero plastic" — but contains a fossil fuel-derived chemical called PBAT.Sirwaggingtons.com
PBAT is typically combined with cornstarch or sugarcane, so a “plant-based” bag advertising those ingredients can often be a tip-off that a fossil fuel product is also involved. Additionally, companies will frequently flag on their packaging that they meet the ASTM D6400 or BPI standards, though these have no provisions against certifying biodegradable products that contain PBAT.
Pet waste bag companies appear to go out of their way to avoid these admissions. Doggy Do Good, a popular sustainable pet waste company, told me in an email they use a “proprietary bio-based material” for “60.9% of the composition of their bags” — that is, the expected amount of PBAT — and added that “this fully biodegradable copolymer is an excellent alternative to polyethylene.” When I pressed to clarify if their proprietary “biodegradable copolymer” in question was PBAT, as I suspected, they stopped replying to my emails. The Original Poop Bag, another green bag company, didn’t answer me at all when I asked if their bags contained the fossil fuel product.
Despite these avoidance tactics, biodegradable bag companies aren’t using PBAT because they nefariously want to ruin the planet. It’s just the dirty secret of the pet waste bag business. As Judge explained in a blog post, “All poo bags have to include PBAT for strength and structure. If they were 100% plant-based, they would turn to mush very quickly when wet, lack strength, and tear easily (some qualities you really don’t want in a poo bag!).”
Fair enough. It’s the lack of transparency that is the problem: Most of these companies are selling fossil fuel-based products to customers who think they’re buying bags made from corn.
What's the other 62%?Doggydogood.com
Ultimately, there are two ways to think about the impact of the pet waste bags you buy: the impact of the materials used to make them and the impact of their disposal. If the latter is your biggest concern — what happens to bags after they’ve been used — biodegradable and “plant-based” bags are still probably the best, if imperfect, option available on the market. You can throw them in the trash (where they belong because again, pet poop is a pollutant) but also know at least that they’ll eventually biodegrade in a landfill (it should be noted, though, that everything is technically biodegradable, and the word means nothing without specification about the timeline and conditions).
From an “input” perspective — what the bags are made of, and how — biodegradable and “plant-based” bags are a little less exciting. They require less virgin fossil fuel than buying a bag entirely made out of traditional single-use plastic, though some research has suggested there is “no real difference in lifetime emissions between” products made with traditional plastic and those made from bioplastics. By another estimate, greenhouse gas emissions “are typically higher for bio-based plastics than recycled and virgin plastics” because “corn requires large amounts of energy, space, and water to grow industrially” and “turning the corn starch (once cultivated) into a polymer requires considerable energy.”
There is one major exception to all of this: Avoid “oxo-biodegradable” products. These are banned in the EU because they break down, sure — but into toxic microplastics.
Though they’re comparatively rare, you can find “recycled plastic” pet waste bags on the market. They apparently cut down on virgin fossil fuels by recycling plastic that’s already been extracted. (Judge’s company, Pet Impact, sells its own poo bag made from recycled ocean plastic, oyster shell waste, and “about 25 to 30%” virgin fossil fuels).
Even 100% recycled materials have their problems.
But while recycled plastic sounds great, it has — you guessed it — its own complications.
“Chemical” or “advanced” plastic recycling is the current sweetheart of the oil and gas industry, despite evidence that recycling plastic isn’t nearly as good as it’s chalked up to be. For one thing, the process of converting old plastics into new plastics is incredibly emissions-intensive and thus requires the burning of fossil fuels to generate the required energy. The recycling process can also spew cancer-causing chemicals into the air that disproportionately poison low-income communities of color, like those in “Cancer Alley.”
This is a problem that stretches far beyond the humble poo bags: Hundreds of companies now sell everything from clothes to shoes to shampoo bottles on the boast that they’re made from recycled plastics. Yet “by feigning ‘recycling’ (really, downcycling) of plastic pollution, companies can divert attention from their role in perpetuating this crisis while pulling in profits,” stresses the advocacy group Plastic Pollution Coalition. Recycled plastic can be just another smokescreen when what’s really needed is a reduction of single-use plastics altogether.
But it was reducing single-use plastics that got me into this whole mess in the first place.
In March 2020, a month when nothing else of note was happening, New York City banned single-use carryout plastic bags, joining San Francisco and a number of other towns around the country. But like many pet owners, grocery store plastic bags had been our go-to litter scooping bags. As we became more conscious of single-use plastics in some parts of our lives, it led us to buy … a bunch of single-use plastics to use for our pets.
As the pandemic wore on, my husband and I eventually decided to fly across the country with Marinka and Virginia in order to be with our families. There, my stepmother introduced us to a revolutionary new poop bag. It didn’t require the extraction of any new fossil fuels, and while it doesn’t break down in a landfill, it also won’t poison any otters.
The name of this holy grail of poop bags? Trash.
Empty bread bags can become the perfect chutes for scoops of litter. Plastic packaging gets a second life as a final resting place for kitty unmentionables. Bags of dry cat food, once exhausted, can be refilled.
This isn’t a perfect solution, either (for example, “produce bags aren’t engineered to be particularly durable, nor to hold in liquids or odors,” Wirecutter warns with the confidence of experience). But if I’ve learned anything in this mad, scatological journey, it’s that there is no perfect solution. What satisfies one person’s environmental concerns — about greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel extraction, or waste and pollution — might not satisfy someone else’s. And at a certain point, you have to make a choice, and likely a compromise, and then move on to focusing on the things that make a bigger difference, like what you drive, where you get your power from, or what you eat.
All this is to say, the trash method works for me because it makes single-use plastics destined for the landfill anyway into twice-use plastics. And at least it allows me not to think about cat poop anymore.
I think I’ve done enough of that to last me a lifetime.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.
The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.
More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.
In order to better understand how communities can build back smarter after — or, ideally, before — a catastrophic fire, I spoke with Efseaff about his work in Paradise and how other communities might be able to replicate it. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Do you live in Paradise? Were you there during the Camp Fire?
I actually live in Chico. We’ve lived here since the mid-‘90s, but I have a long connection to Paradise; I’ve worked for the district since 2017. I’m also a sea kayak instructor and during the Camp Fire, I was in South Carolina for a training. I was away from the phone until I got back at the end of the day and saw it blowing up with everything.
I have triplet daughters who were attending Butte College at the time, and they needed to be evacuated. There was a lot of uncertainty that day. But it gave me some perspective, because I couldn’t get back for two days. It gave me a chance to think, “Okay, what’s our response going to be?” Looking two days out, it was like: That would have been payroll, let’s get people together, and then let’s figure out what we’re going to do two weeks and two months from now.
It also got my mind thinking about what we would have done going backwards. If you’d had two weeks to prepare, you would have gotten your go-bag together, you’d have come up with your evacuation route — that type of thing. But when you run the movie backwards on what you would have done differently if you had two years or two decades, it would include prepping the landscape, making some safer community defensible space. That’s what got me started.
Was it your idea to buy up the high-risk properties in the burn scar?
I would say I adapted it. Everyone wants to say it was their idea, but I’ll tell you where it came from: Pre-fire, the thinking was that it would make sense for the town to have a perimeter trail from a recreation standpoint. But I was also trying to pitch it as a good idea from a fuel standpoint, so that if there was a wildfire, you could respond to it. Certainly, the idea took on a whole other dimension after the Camp Fire.
I’m a restoration ecologist, so I’ve done a lot of river floodplain work. There are a lot of analogies there. The trend has been to give nature a little bit more room: You’re not going to stop a flood, but you can minimize damage to human infrastructure. Putting levees too close to the river makes them more prone to failing and puts people at risk — but if you can set the levee back a little bit, it gives the flood waters room to go through. That’s why I thought we need a little bit of a buffer in Paradise and some protection around the community. We need a transition between an area that is going to burn, and that we can let burn, but not in a way that is catastrophic.
How hard has it been to find willing sellers? Do most people in the area want to rebuild — or need to because of their mortgages?
Ironically, the biggest challenge for us is finding adequate funding. A lot of the property we have so far has been donated to us. It’s probably upwards of — oh, let’s see, at least half a dozen properties have been donated, probably close to 200 acres at this point.
We are applying for some federal grants right now, and we’ll see how that goes. What’s evolved quite a bit on this in recent years, though, is that — because we’ve done some modeling — instead of thinking of the buffer as areas that are managed uniformly around the community, we’re much more strategic. These fire events are wind-driven, and there are only a couple of directions where the wind blows sufficiently long enough and powerful enough for the other conditions to fall into play. That’s not to say other events couldn’t happen, but we’re going after the most likely events that would cause catastrophic fires, and that would be from the Diablo winds, or north winds, that come through our area. That was what happened in the Camp Fire scenario, and another one our models caught what sure looked a lot like the [2024] Park Fire.
One thing that I want to make clear is that some people think, “Oh, this is a fire break. It’s devoid of vegetation.” No, what we’re talking about is a well-managed habitat. These are shaded fuel breaks. You maintain the big trees, you get rid of the ladder fuels, and you get rid of the dead wood that’s on the ground. We have good examples with our partners, like the Butte Fire Safe Council, on how this works, and it looks like it helped protect the community of Cohasset during the Park Fire. They did some work on some strips there, and the fire essentially dropped to the ground before it came to Paradise Lake. You didn’t have an aerial tanker dropping retardant, you didn’t have a $2-million-per-day fire crew out there doing work. It was modest work done early and in the right place that actually changed the behavior of the fire.
Tell me a little more about the modeling you’ve been doing.
We looked at fire pathways with a group called XyloPlan out of the Bay Area. The concept is that you simulate a series of ignitions with certain wind conditions, terrain, and vegetation. The model looked very much like a Camp Fire scenario; it followed the same pathway, going towards the community in a little gulch that channeled high winds. You need to interrupt that pathway — and that doesn’t necessarily mean creating an area devoid of vegetation, but if you have these areas where the fire behavior changes and drops down to the ground, then it slows the travel. I found this hard to believe, but in the modeling results, in a scenario like the Camp Fire, it could buy you up to eight hours. With modern California firefighting, you could empty out the community in a systematic way in that time. You could have a vigorous fire response. You could have aircraft potentially ready. It’s a game-changing situation, rather than the 30 minutes Paradise had when the Camp Fire started.
How does this work when you’re dealing with private property owners, though? How do you convince them to move or donate their land?
We’re a Park and Recreation District so we don’t have regulatory authority. We are just trying to run with a good idea with the properties that we have so far — those from willing donors mostly, but there have been a couple of sales. If we’re unable to get federal funding or state support, though, I ultimately think this idea will still have to be here — whether it’s five, 10, 15, or 50 years from now. We have to manage this area in a comprehensive way.
Private property rights are very important, and we don’t want to impinge on that. And yet, what a person does on their property has a huge impact on the 30,000 people who may be downwind of them. It’s an unusual situation: In a hurricane, if you have a hurricane-rated roof and your neighbor doesn’t, and theirs blows off, you feel sorry for your neighbor but it’s probably not going to harm your property much. In a wildfire, what your neighbor has done with the wood, or how they treat vegetation, has a significant impact on your home and whether your family is going to survive. It’s a fundamentally different kind of event than some of the other disasters we look at.
Do you have any advice for community leaders who might want to consider creating buffer zones or something similar to what you’re doing in Paradise?
Start today. You have to think about these things with some urgency, but they’re not something people think about until it happens. Paradise, for many decades, did not have a single escaped wildfire make it into the community. Then, overnight, the community is essentially wiped out. But in so many places, these events are foreseeable; we’re just not wired to think about them or prepare for them.
Buffers around communities make a lot of sense, even from a road network standpoint. Even from a trash pickup standpoint. You don’t think about this, but if your community is really strung out, making it a little more thoughtfully laid out also makes it more economically viable to provide services to people. Some things we look for now are long roads that don’t have any connections — that were one-way in and no way out. I don’t think [the traffic jams and deaths in] Paradise would have happened with what we know now, but I kind of think [authorities] did know better beforehand. It just wasn’t economically viable at the time; they didn’t think it was a big deal, but they built the roads anyway. We can be doing a lot of things smarter.
A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.
A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”
But tucked in its press release was an admission from the company’s vice president of development Derek Moretz: this was also about the town, which had enacted a bylaw significantly restricting solar development that the company was until recently fighting vigorously in court.
“There are very few areas in the Commonwealth that are feasible to reach its clean energy goals,” Moretz stated. “We respect the Town’s conservation go als, but it is clear that systemic reforms are needed for Massachusetts to source its own energy.”
This stems from a story that probably sounds familiar: after proposing the projects, PureSky began reckoning with a burgeoning opposition campaign centered around nature conservation. Led by a fresh opposition group, Smart Solar Shutesbury, activists successfully pushed the town to drastically curtail development in 2023, pointing to the amount of forest acreage that would potentially be cleared in order to construct the projects. The town had previously not permitted facilities larger than 15 acres, but the fresh change went further, essentially banning battery storage and solar projects in most areas.
When this first happened, the state Attorney General’s office actually had PureSky’s back, challenging the legality of the bylaw that would block construction. And PureSky filed a lawsuit that was, until recently, ongoing with no signs of stopping. But last week, shortly after the Treasury Department unveiled its rules for implementing Trump’s new tax and spending law, which basically repealed the Inflation Reduction Act, PureSky settled with the town and dropped the lawsuit – and the projects went away along with the court fight.
What does this tell us? Well, things out in the country must be getting quite bleak for solar developers in areas with strident and locked-in opposition that could be costly to fight. Where before project developers might have been able to stomach the struggle, money talks – and the dollars are starting to tell executives to lay down their arms.
The picture gets worse on the macro level: On Monday, the Solar Energy Industries Association released a report declaring that federal policy changes brought about by phasing out federal tax incentives would put the U.S. at risk of losing upwards of 55 gigawatts of solar project development by 2030, representing a loss of more than 20 percent of the project pipeline.
But the trade group said most of that total – 44 gigawatts – was linked specifically to the Trump administration’s decision to halt federal permitting for renewable energy facilities, a decision that may impact generation out west but has little-to-know bearing on most large solar projects because those are almost always on private land.
Heatmap Pro can tell us how much is at stake here. To give you a sense of perspective, across the U.S., over 81 gigawatts worth of renewable energy projects are being contested right now, with non-Western states – the Northeast, South and Midwest – making up almost 60% of that potential capacity.
If historical trends hold, you’d expect a staggering 49% of those projects to be canceled. That would be on top of the totals SEIA suggests could be at risk from new Trump permitting policies.
I suspect the rate of cancellations in the face of project opposition will increase. And if this policy landscape is helping activists kill projects in blue states in desperate need of power, like Massachusetts, then the future may be more difficult to swallow than we can imagine at the moment.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.
1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.
2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.
3. Daviess County, Kentucky – NextEra’s having some problems getting past this county’s setbacks.
4. Columbia County, Georgia – Sometimes the wealthy will just say no to a solar farm.
5. Ottawa County, Michigan – A proposed battery storage facility in the Mitten State looks like it is about to test the state’s new permitting primacy law.