Green Dog Cleaning expands recycling's reach

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Kim Hormby, Stay Pet Hotel

Green Dog Cleaning, a business that collects and composts pet waste, was a dream come true for Kim Hormby.

It’s not that she couldn’t handle the 100-plus pounds of pooch poop generated each week by her expanding North Portland pet boarding business, Stay Pet Hotel. It’s just that she was tired of the guilt.

“We knew there was some poop recycling going on in San Francisco and we kept hoping it would happen here,” said Hormby, who expanded her 11-employee business in November to be able to accommodate three times the dogs as overnight boarders — which in turn generated three times the waste.

So when Hormby met Lance Donnovan, co-founder of Lake Oswego-based Green Dog Cleaning, and heard about the service Donnovan launched in January, her mouth dropped open.

“I was so happy,” she said.

Now Green Dog Cleaning collects waste from Stay on a weekly basis, and adds it to the company’s composting operation in Silverton. Stay is one of a handful of commercial clients that Green Dog is serving as it ramps up its operation and fine tunes its pet waste composting plan.

According to a 2007 report from the Oregon Environmental Council, dog waste accounts for 15 percent of the fecal bacteria in some Oregon streams. In order to prevent water contamination, dog owners are encouraged to pick up after their pets. But there hasn’t been a widespread option for owners who want to do so without sending that waste to the landfills.

Similar to EnviroWagg of Aurora, Colo., Green Dog is aiming to appeal to those green-minded pet owners who are ramping up their personal recycling efforts.

Donnovan and his business partner, Matt Perry, were at the dog park when the idea occurred to them.

“We saw all these people who would carry an empty water bottle for miles before they’d ever throw it in the trash, and they were all picking up after their dogs and putting these individual plastic bags of poop into the landfill to sit for years and years,” Donnovan said.

So the pair did some research, pooled $10,000 in start-up capital and launched the service. Green Dog has five employees, about 100 retail clients and a handful of commercial customers. The business just signed a contract with the managers of the South Waterfront complex to pick up pet waste from the development’s pet stations and is in talks with the Pearl District Neighborhood Association to do something similar.

Green Dog is fine-tuning its composting recipe, which uses pet waste, including compostable cat litter, along with sawdust or grass clippings. The key is making sure the temperature of the break-down process is high enough to kill all the pathogens in the waste. The mixture then cures into compost.

The first batch of compost, which will be distributed to customers as samples, should be ready later this summer.

Donnovan said the company is also interested in exploring the use of digesters that would break down the waste and produce methane.

Compressed and scrubbed, what Green Dog calls “poopane” could then be used to power vehicles much like natural gas.

“There are a lot of different directions we can go with this in the long term,” Donnovan said. “So many different ways to reduce our carbon footprint, or paw print.”

Donnovan said the Oregon Humane Society has expressed interest in becoming a customer, but Green Dog’s founders want to work out the kinks in the business before taking on the 150 gallons of waste a day generated by that operation. His goal is to sign that contract by the end of summer.