Home & Garden...

You may have never even considered this before going green, but there are real human dangers of kitty litter dust that you breathe in while changing the litter box. It's thought by some to be a carcinogen, which seems a damn unneccessary danger to bring into the home, and all for a task your kitty could just take care of in the dirt outside.

So here are three of the most commonly found alternatives, none of which will raise dangerous dust for you or your cat to inhale into your lungs.

1. Feline Pine Pellets: this is the standard alterna-litter and without question, the best. Made from pine tree scraps from lumber mills, it even smells a bit piney when you first put it in. It looks a bit like short pretzel sticks, so it does seem odd at first (but so would your clay-based, strip-mined "normal" litter if you had never used it before).

2. Yesterday's News: This one is Purina's recycled-newspaper version of Feline Pine. The bits are even shaped the same, except gray instead of a woody color. This works okay, but the Feline Pine is still preferable. It may have just been the piney scent I missed, or maybe it was slightly easier to deal with.

3.Swheat Scoop: This litter is made from naturally processed, biodegradable wheat. Sounds great to us, too, but in practice--it clumped into solid masses that stuck to the box. They want you to clean the litter box twice a day, and that's just a little too demanding for our world-saving schedule.