Plastic Obsessed

I may be obsessed with plastic. Just ask my cat.

Several weeks ago, when packing up my Swash Labs office for the #summerswash remote work experiment which sent our entire company to home offices, I noticed a carton of cat litter box liners that didn't make a co-worker's packing cut. Being the pre-dumpster-diver that I am, and with a point-of-view that single-use plastic is better than never-used plastic, I fished the carton out of the trash and took it home. (side note in case you haven't read previous blog posts: I've sworn off purchasing single-use plastic for the year 2015 so I can't buy things like cat litter box liners)

My cat Lizzie has always preferred the balcony off my bedroom to any other space in the world, so we keep a litter box on that balcony for her convenience. Now if you live in North Texas, you know that May and June 2015 were two of the rainiest months in history, and a sufficient amount of that rain came down sideways. It shouldn't take much imagination to picture what that did to a litter box on a balcony. This is where those glorious single-use plastic cat box liners turned what could have been a full-blown gross-out-nightmare-from-hell into just another smelly task. (contextual note: I have chickens, and donkeys, and ducks, and I spend an inordinate amount of time on smelly tasks of this ilk.)

Now the story turns dark. Because today, after lifting that oh-so-convenient litter bag out of the box, and replacing it with another oh-so-convenient bag, I looked at the number of liners left in the box, and then I looked at my 19-year-old cat, and then I looked at those liners again, and I seriously wondered: which one will last longer? Am I plastic obsessed? Lizzie thinks so, and she's not amused.