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Poop Bags? What's the difference?

Little Green Dog bags are fully biodegradable, 100% home compostable, and made with 40% plants — unlike the vast majority of the other options on the market, which claim to be environmentally friendly but are (excuse the pun) full of crap.

Here’s a quick rundown of the three different standards of bag:

First, there’s plastic. Low-cost, $2-shop-type bags that clog our oceans and get lodged in dolphins’ blowholes. Don’t buy these.

Next, there’s ‘biodegradable’ — or if they’re being sneaky (which they often are), just degradable. As it turns out, there are no strict rules or regulations on what constitutes a biodegradable bag, and even the plastic ones will eventually biodegrade after thousands of years, so they sort of count.

For most providers in New Zealand, ‘biodegradable’ means plastic with a degradable agent added. The agent breaks down in a few months but leaves behind millions of tiny bits of plastic known as microplastics that have a not-very-green habit of landing themselves in waterways and most definitely sh*tting on the environment.

Lastly, there’s compostable. This standard is classified a few different ways so we’ll break it down as simply as possible. First there’s the overarching New Zealand-recognised international standards; American ASTM6400 and European EN13432.

We’ve gone for the higher EN13432 standard for our bags which is represented by the ‘seedling’ logo by DIN CERTO with the certification number below the seedling. you should be very skeptical of any company that claims a certain eco-friendliness without being able to back it up..

  
(Little Green Dog’s EN13432 and home compost certificate numbers)
   

EN13432 doesn’t distinguish between home and industrial compostability though, so there’s a subset of EN13432 which in Europe is certified by TUV Austria. Being home compost-certified is a much more difficult status to attain, as the product has to break down in a more natural backyard compost setting.

Our poop bags are certified Home Compostable which means they usually require somewhere around 20°C to 30°C to break down, and they’re given a longer time period to do so (usually 90% degradation in 365 days). 

It's easier (and cheaper) to produce bags that meet the lower ‘biodegradable’ standard, like other companies have. But we take pride in doing the right thing when it comes to Little Green Dog bags — and when we look at how we treat the Earth, it’s what’s right that matters. Not what’s easy.


So join the Little Green Dog movement, and take care of your pup without sh*tting on the environment!

Credit blog content - Little Green Dog 

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