Cat-litter industry as finicky as felines

By Chris Bagley

For the AJC

With at least one cat in nearly a third of American households, the $1 billion cat-litter industry — which has long relied on Georgia clay — believed it had a secure future.

But a dizzying variety of new litter has entered the market in the last decade and threatened Georgia’s position as the leading litter producer.

At least two large factories have closed as cat owners shift to clays that form clumps when wet, allowing easy removal with a slotted scoop. Pine, wheat and other natural products have also gained in popularity.

“I don’t mess around with the old-school stuff, because with four cats, the scooping is very important,” said Jill Severn, a library employee at the University of Georgia in Athens. “When scoopable litter became available, it was like nirvana.”

Since its introduction in the late 1940s, clay-based litter has allowed cats to remain indoors.

Central and South Georgia are home to huge deposits of fuller’s earth, a family of clays named for the tradesmen who once used them to scrub oils from sheep’s wool. Clay can soak up liquids several times its weight, and traditional litter relies on chemicals that neutralize odors.

One of the most common clay varieties in traditional cat litter is known as attapulgite , after the town of Attapulgus in Georgia’s southwest corner. The area’s cat-litter business has had its share of ups and downs in recent years.

A factory in Thomas County has been making a traditional variety of Fresh Step litter for the Clorox Co. since Clorox closed its own plant in Wrens, southwest of Augusta, in 2001. But Waverly Industries, the manufacturer of Glamour Kitty litter, closed its Thomas County plant in 2008. Both of the shuttered factories made traditional litter.

The remaining factory employs 300 people and is now the only cat-litter plant in Georgia, according to a spokeswoman for its owner, Chicago-based Oil-Dri Corp. Oil-Dri is gradually making less traditional litter, while expanding its production of scoopable litters, according to its most recent annual reports.

Oil-Dri owns or leases 3,800 acres in southwest Georgia, with an estimated 40 million tons of clay reserves. The various clays on those lands have numerous other uses, including in oil drilling, industrial clean-up and agriculture.

Industrywide growth has also slowed, with annual sales expanding by a fraction of a percent, to $832 million in the last 12 months, according to Information Resources. The firm’s figures don’t include litter sold at Wal-Mart stores.

Bill Moll, a former research director for Oil-Dri, said the cat-litter industry’s future is hardly in jeopardy, as long as cats remain finicky. Cat owners who prefer the scoopable clumps say they try as many as a half-dozen varieties before finding one that agrees with Fluffy or Max.

“Certainly, the clumping cat litters will never supplant granular cat litter,” Moll said.