Are biodegradable dog poop bags worth it? What the FTC told the industry

Biodegradable dog poop bags are the single most common claim in this category and the one with the least behind it. The Federal Trade Commission has already written to this industry about it. In February 2015 the FTC's staff sent warning letters to marketers and sellers of dog waste bags telling them their biodegradable and compostable claims likely violated the FTC Act. The letter is public, it is two pages long, and it is more useful than anything printed on a box.

This article is what that letter says, what the underlying rule requires, and what the honest answer is for someone standing in a shop trying to make a decision.

What the FTC told sellers of biodegradable dog poop bags

The letter sets out two separate problems.

The first is the claim itself. To call a product biodegradable without qualification, a seller needs competent and reliable scientific evidence that it will degrade in most landfills within the claimed time period, or within one year if no period is stated. The letter also makes a point that most packaging quietly avoids: a seller making this claim needs evidence that a substantial majority of consumers will not dispose of the bags in a landfill or an incineration facility, because material sent to either of those places does not biodegrade in any useful sense.

The second problem is the fine print used to escape the first. The letter says that a disclaimer which is not clear and conspicuous will not cure the potential for deception. A small line on the back of a box explaining that the bag only biodegrades under conditions that do not exist where you throw it away does not fix a headline that says otherwise.

You can read the letter in full on the FTC's own site. It is worth ten minutes.

The one year rule, and the landfill problem

The rule behind the letter is part of the FTC's Green Guides, at 16 CFR 260.8. It applies to degradable, biodegradable, oxo-degradable, oxo-biodegradable and photodegradable claims alike, so changing the prefix does not change the obligation.

Three things in that section decide this whole question.

The evidence standard. An unqualified degradable claim requires competent and reliable scientific evidence that "the entire item will completely break down and return to nature" within a reasonably short time after customary disposal. The entire item, not the parts of it a laboratory found convenient.

The one year benchmark. For items that enter the solid waste stream, an unqualified claim is deceptive if the items "do not completely decompose within one year after customary disposal."

The destination. This is the part that settles it. The rule says unqualified claims for items "customarily disposed in landfills, incinerators, and recycling facilities are deceptive" because "these locations do not present conditions in which complete decomposition will occur within one year."

Where does a dog waste bag customarily go? Into a bin, and from there to landfill or incineration. That is not a technicality. It is the normal and intended use of the product.

Compostable is a different claim, and a harder one

Compostable and biodegradable are not synonyms, and the FTC letter treats them separately.

For a compostable claim, the letter says a seller needs evidence that all the materials in the item will break down into usable compost in a timely manner, and for a dog waste bag specifically, evidence that the bag and its contents will completely break down in about the same time as the materials they are composted with. It also says the claim should be qualified if the bags cannot be composted safely, in a timely way and easily in a home compost pile or device.

That last clause is where most of these products fall over. A bag certified for an industrial composting facility is a real engineering achievement. It is also irrelevant if there is no such facility that will take dog waste within fifty miles of you, which for most readers of this article there is not.

Where a compostable bag does make sense

There is a genuine case and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If your municipality runs an organics collection that explicitly accepts pet waste, a certified compostable bag is the right product and a recycled polyethylene bag like ours is the wrong one. That is a small number of places, and it is growing.

The way to find out is to check your own municipality's waste pages rather than the bag box. Most will tell you the opposite. Metro Vancouver, for example, tells residents to keep dog waste out of the green bin entirely and not to flush any bags, including those labelled biodegradable, because they cause problems for the wastewater system. The city of Poulsbo in Washington State is blunter in its pet waste FAQ: household trash is the preferred disposal method, and neither home compost piles nor municipal yard waste composting reach temperatures that kill the pathogens of concern.

What actually happens to the bag

It helps to know the scale of the thing you are trying to improve. The EPA's material specific data on plastics puts United States plastics generation in 2018 at about 35.7 million tons, roughly 12 percent of municipal solid waste, with an overall plastics recycling rate of 8.7 percent. Natural HDPE bottles, the best performing common plastic in that dataset, reached 29.3 percent.

A waste bag is not in either of those streams. It goes to landfill with its contents, as it is supposed to, and it stays there. No label changes that.

So are they worth it?

Here is the honest answer in three parts.

If your city composts pet waste, buy a certified compostable bag. Not biodegradable. Certified compostable, and check the certification against what your collection accepts.

If your city does not, the environmental difference between a biodegradable bag and an ordinary one in your bin is close to nothing, and the rule quoted above is the reason. You are paying for a word that describes conditions your bin does not provide.

If you want the claim to be true anyway, the thing to look for is a qualified claim rather than a bare one: a stated time period, a stated set of conditions, and a stated disposal route. A seller who publishes those three things has told you something checkable. A seller who prints one adjective has not.

What we do, and the part that does not flatter us

Our bags are not biodegradable and we do not say they are. They are 65 percent recycled high density polyethylene, which is a claim about where the material came from rather than where it goes. It does not solve the end of life problem. It reduces the amount of new plastic made to produce the bag, and that is the whole of it.

We would rather make that smaller claim accurately than a larger one we cannot evidence. The same logic is why we print our film gauge: if you want to understand dog poop bag thickness you need a number, and if you want to understand a green claim you need a condition and a time period. Adjectives do not survive contact with either question.

The short version

The FTC has written to this category once already. The rule it was enforcing says an unqualified biodegradable claim is deceptive for products that customarily end up in landfill, and dog waste bags customarily end up in landfill. Unless your municipality collects pet waste for composting, the word on the box is doing nothing for the planet and something for the price. Check your city's waste page, not the packaging.

Our bags are 13 by 9 inches, 15 micron, unscented and 65 percent recycled HDPE. None of those four facts is a green claim, which is deliberate.