Sask. company using flax waste to create sustainable cat litter

Darla Ponace · CBC News

· Posted: Jun 30, 2025 6:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 6 hours ago

The Regina Humane Society is partnering with Prairie Clean Energy (PCE) to present a locally made, environmentally affable kitty litter made from flax straw.

Prairie Clean Cat Litter is made wholly from flax straw, a discarded merchandise near implicit erstwhile flax is harvested.

"It is wholly biodegradable, wholly natural, and it eliminates the feline pee smell," said Mark Cooper, CEO of PCE successful Regina. "Your houses are going to odor cleaner, your cats are gonna beryllium happier, you're gonna person little ammonia successful your home, and it is each Saskatchewan-made flax."

Cooper said the institution was looking for innovative ways to recycle flax straw.

"We truly absorption connected stopping the burning of flax straw, creating caller gross streams for farmers processing that straw, and creating aggregate merchandise streams that we merchantability astir the world, lone 1 of which is feline litter, but it's an important one," helium said.

Cooper said PCE has been moving with the Humane Society for a twelvemonth investigating retired the litter and received positive feedback.

"Once they were satisfied that we had a bully merchandise connected our hands," helium said. "We started putting unneurotic a concern that would marque consciousness for them to assistance trim their operational costs, and would link the cats and feline radical with a large litter option."

Now erstwhile radical follow a feline from the humane society, they tin besides instrumentality immoderate of the Prairie Clean Cat Litter home.

"So we've truly structured a concern to payment cats and the radical that emotion their cats," Cooper said.

Dr. Catherine Ball, manager of veterinary attraction astatine the Regina Humane Society, said it used the litter for 40 cats. 

"We observed what happened with those cats, arsenic good arsenic with a akin radical of cats that had clay litter, and we were capable to find retired that this merchandise from PCE performed precise well," she said.

Traditional clay litters tin get stuck onto the bottommost of cats' paws. Ball said that happened little utilizing the flax straw litter.

Cooper said the humane nine adopts retired 1,500 cats per year.

"We cognize that those cats volition beryllium utilizing our litter and that each azygous idiosyncratic who adopts a feline from the Humane Society volition permission with a escaped bag," helium said.

"Our volition is to rotation retired this concern to humane societies everywhere."