How to Dispose of Dog Poop in Montgomery County

Picking it up is only half the job. The other half is where it goes, and Montgomery County has a few local wrinkles that make some of the usual internet advice a bad idea here. This is what we tell customers who scoop on their own between visits.

Bag it and put it in the trash

This is the accepted method everywhere in the county, and it is what we recommend. Bag the waste, tie it off, and put it in your regular household trash. Waste haulers in Montgomery County take it with everything else. Double-bagging is not required, but it keeps the can from smelling in July, which is the real reason people do it.

The one thing to avoid is leaving a bag in the can for a week in summer. It draws flies to the can and makes trash day unpleasant. If you scoop yourself, scoop the day before pickup. If we scoop for you, we haul the waste away with us so nothing sits in your bin at all.

Do not flush it if you are on septic

You will read online that flushing dog waste is fine because sewage treatment handles it. That is true on a municipal sewer system. Most of Magnolia, the acreage around Montgomery and Willis, and a large share of Conroe outside the city limits are on septic. Dog waste in a septic tank adds solids the system is not sized for, and the parasite eggs it carries do not break down in a tank. Do not flush it on septic, and do not flush the “flushable” bags on any system. They clog.

Do not bury it near a well or a garden

Burying works in theory and fails in practice. Roundworm eggs can survive in soil for years, so a shallow hole in the corner of the yard is a parasite reservoir, not a disposal method. It is a worse idea near a private well, which many acreage homes here have, or anywhere near a vegetable bed. If you bury, go at least a foot deep, well away from water and food plants, and understand you are storing it, not getting rid of it.

Composting, with a big caveat

Dog waste can be composted, but only in a hot compost that reliably holds temperature long enough to kill pathogens, and the result should never go on anything you eat. A backyard tumbler does not get there. If you are serious about it, there are dedicated in-ground pet waste digesters that use enzymes and work in warm soil, which we have plenty of. They slow down in a Montgomery County January and can flood in a wet spring, so they are a supplement, not a replacement.

Never the storm drain, never the ditch

Storm drains in our area are not connected to a treatment plant. They run to the nearest creek, to Spring Creek, or straight into Lake Conroe. Roadside ditches do the same thing more slowly. Hosing waste toward the street or dumping a bag in a ditch puts bacteria directly into the water people swim in. Around the lake, the San Jacinto River Authority tests for exactly this every month.

What we do with it

On a service visit we bag everything, put it in a lined bin on the truck, and dispose of it off site with commercial waste. Nothing is left in your can. Tools are disinfected between yards so nothing travels from one property to the next. If you would rather hand the whole thing off, residential pooper scooper service in Montgomery County starts at $21 a visit, first cleanup free.