Everyone poops. Take dogs and cats, for example—the 200 million of them that populate the United States produce enough waste to submerge 1,000 football fields one foot deep each year. Most folks bag and toss pet leavings into the garbage, but so much brown refuse places a big burden on the environment. Leachate from manure can leak into the water table and greenhouse gases such as methane can migrate into the atmosphere.

So what to do with all that doo?

Rose Seemann addresses that vexing issue in The Pet Poo Pocket Guide, a primer on how to divert cat and doggie dumps from dumpsters by using processes practiced by most organic gardeners.

Seemann, who owns and operates a business that converts pet waste into garden soil, describes seven at-home methods for disposing pet excrement: flushing, burying, biodigesting, composting, moldering, vermiculturing, and even pickling it (using bokashi, an anaerobic composting process). In aptly down-to-earth prose, the book serves as an effective primer to alchemize “D/CW”—dog and cat waste—into a green gardener's gold. After reading the book, you might hanker for an extra pooch to fortify your inventory of brown and a bokashi bin to cook it in.

The book's not-so-subtle message? The simple act of cultivating canine and feline night soil, in Seemann’s words, is not only “doo-able,” but also represents one small step toward dealing with society's thornier environmental challenges.

The Pet Poo Pocket Guide: How to Safely Compost and Recycle Pet Waste by Rose Seemann (New Society Publishers, 2015)

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