Did you know that 30 percent of the environmental impact of meat consumption in the U.S. comes from food intended for cats and dogs? Agriculture is already the second biggest contributor to carbon emissions, but what if you could help your pets combat that?
When you take steps to get them better food, and you switch up things in your pet cleaning routine, their impact on the environment improves drastically. So, what should you do?
Read on for three of the best tips.
1. Make Your Own Solutions
The single biggest thing you can do is create your own cleaning solutions with products like baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, and white vinegar. Using essential oil in these products is sometimes OK to do, but you have to be careful because some can have a negative impact on your pet’s respiratory system.
Not only does this cut down on the amount of plastic used to create these kinds of products, but it also cuts down on the number of chemicals used and emissions potentially released into the environment with their use.
Buying cleaning product concentrate is even a great idea since you’re not buying new bottles all the time. Click here to learn more.
2. Review Your Routines
Another great thing you can do is review the routine you have for cleaning up after your pet. Cat litter and doggie bags are surprisingly wasteful pet products that are somehow unavoidable if you live with animals.
Replacements for the products, like compostable bags and paper litter, are becoming increasingly easy to find, and they’re great for lessening you and your pet’s carbon footprint.
Exploring and changing other parts of your routine is another great thing to do. With everything from feed, playing, and even grooming, you’d be surprised at the impact taking a few minutes to rethink these areas can have on the environment.
You can even sit down with a pen and paper to write down some ideas you have for creating more sustainable habits in these areas, or you can take some time to research and see what others have done.
3. Spay and Neuter
This one might seem the least obvious, but it’s one of the best ways to help your pet remain environmentally friendly. There is an overwhelming number of pets without homes, which means a lot of waste gets left out in the streets, and more pets end up in shelters.
A great way to combat this is by removing the risk of overpopulation and unnecessary euthanizations due to overwhelmed shelters.
Pet Cleaning Can Be Easy
Just because you own a pet doesn’t mean pet cleaning has to be hard. In fact, once you take the steps to switch up your routine, you’ll find that it can be one of the easiest things to keep up with. The hardest part is making the switch, but once you do it’s usually simple to keep up with.
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