Andy Ewing

It turns out that there are tons of incentive problems with cleaning up after your pet, meaning that as a dog-owning economist with a blog I’m obligated to write about all of them.  I talked about the idea of placing a special bin on city streets for dog-waste in yesterday’s post with an eye toward recycling dog-waste for energy.  Today, I came across a post on the Freakonomics blog that cites a city that is doing something similar, albeit for the purpose of fining those dog owners who aren’t as responsible as myself.  From the original article:

The city will use the DNA database it is building to match feces to a registered dog and identify its owner.

Owners who scoop up their dogs’ droppings and place them in specially marked bins on Petah Tikva’s streets will be eligible for rewards of pet food coupons and dog toys.

But droppings found underfoot in the street and matched through the DNA database to a registered pet could earn its owner a municipal fine.

Hopefully, this will be my last dog-poop-related post for a while.  Speaking of which, it’s time for Layla’s walk!

Claire sent me a link to this older article earlier today about San Francisco’s attempt at converting dog poop into energy.  From the article:

Under the pilot plan, announced this week, Sunset Scavenger will place biodegradable bags and what are tastefully called dog-waste carts in a popular San Francisco dog park. The dog poo will then be put into a methane digester, where bacteria will eat away at it for two weeks before it turns into methane gas. The gas can then be used to power appliances such as cookers and heaters that currently run on natural gas. It can also be used to generate electricity.

The best part about the article is that it highlights several problems that I have discussed with Katie in the past few months regarding Seattle’s bag tax.  Namely, if the 20-cent tax per plastic bag at a grocery store goes through, what do the dog owners do if those same bags were helping them comply with the dog-waste pick-up laws?  We may just see more poop going un-picked-up, who knows?  Of course, the (debateably) environmentally proper way to dispose of dog-waste is to get it into the toilet, but as most pet owners know, there’s rarely a toilet handy on your walks.  (Another way would be to compost it yourself, but there are issues of remaining bacteria getting into your vegetables or even the water supply if you do this.)

I’m wondering how much it would cost San Francisco or Seattle to provide smaller versions of these “dog-waste carts” and biodegradeable bags every few blocks throughout the city.  We already have public trash cans, public recycle bins, etc.  Why not another small bin next to it that can possibly yield some extra methane power?