Dog Fur Recycling: How Spitz Groom Gives Fur a Second Life
If you've ever picked your dog up from Spitz Groom and wondered what happens to all the fur we clip off, you're onto something.
We produce a genuinely surprising amount of it, especially on a big shedding day. A Samoyed can leave behind an impressive pile of undercoat, a Pomeranian can turn a grooming session into a small snowstorm, and anyone who's met a Husky mid-shed knows that ‘a little bit of fur’ is optimistic at best.
None of it goes to landfill.
Your dog's fur goes into FOGO
Spitz Groom sits within the City of Yarra, and the council provides a lime-green-lidded FOGO bin (Food and Garden Organics) to every household and business in the council area. One item on the City of Yarra's accepted list is easy to miss: Animal Hair (Yarra City Council – What to put in your bins).
That means the clean fur we collect during grooming goes into the same FOGO stream as food scraps and garden waste. The key word is clean, we're talking about fur removed during grooming, not pet faeces, animal remains, litter or other contaminated material. Yarra specifically excludes those from FOGO.
What happens after it leaves the salon
Yarra City Council sends its FOGO material to an organics processing facility in Epping. (Yarra City Council – Reducing Waste), where it's composted and matured. Rather than sitting in a hole with nowhere to go, it becomes something usable again: according to Council, the finished compost goes into agriculture, parks and gardens.
So, the fur that came off your dog during their appointment ends up as one small part of a much larger recycling process.
Why bother separating it at all
Organic material doesn't break down cleanly in landfill. Buried without oxygen, food and garden waste generates methane as it decomposes. FOGO gives that material a different path: instead of being buried, it's processed into compost and returned to the soil.
Sustainability Victoria puts it plainly: sorting food and garden organics correctly cuts landfill volume, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and produces something genuinely useful. Not bad for a bin most people never think twice about.
A little less landfill, one dog at a time
Sustainability isn't usually the first thing people associate with dog grooming, but salons generate organic waste every day, and at Spitz Groom that mostly means fur. We're not claiming to save the planet one dog groom at a time. But making use of a system that already exists is a straightforward, better choice than sending it all to landfill, and when you're grooming a lot of very fluffy dogs, it adds up.
So next time your dog comes home looking suspiciously smaller, there's a bit more going on than a good haircut. That fur goes into our FOGO bin, joins the rest of the City of Yarra's food and garden organics on the way to Epping, and eventually becomes compost that supports agriculture, parks and gardens elsewhere in Victoria.
Your dog's fur has had its day at the salon. Its second life is just getting started.
Want to know more?
- City of Yarra Council: What to put in your bins - confirms animal fur is accepted in FOGO, and that the City of Yarra's FOGO is composted for agriculture, parks and gardens.
- Compost Connect: Victorias FOGO - Under the Recycling Victoria policy and the Circular Economy (Waste Reduction and Recycling) Act 2021, all Victorian councils are required to provide access to FOGO or a local composting alternative by 2030.
- Sustainability Victoria: Keep rubbish out of your FOGO bin - the broader Victorian FOGO system and the case for diverting organics from landfill.