Sunday cat blogging

Hi. I have an important question. Sorry, no fun pictures. We are trying to be green, as you may have guessed with my recent posts on biking and car use. We also have cats. Two for now, maybe outsourcing one soonish. I just cleaned out the litter boxes. We have resolved to try to do this more often (we often make this resolution).

In any case, here's the deal: currently we use plastic bags from the market, but sometimes recently we get low on these, as we are trying to bring our own reusable bags. Someone recently suggested on CAP that folks use smaller bags from grocery purchases for this: bags from bread or other products, not the bag you put groceries in at the checkout. I like this idea, and I think it will work for us as we do unfortunately buy a number of processed foods that come in a plastic bag of one sort or another. And, it seems to me that if we clean the litter boxes more often, the size of the bags is less of an issue.

We have friends who use something like a diaper genie for cats to control odors once the box has been scooped. This seems like a great idea for apartment living, and hey, even in a house, who wants the place to smell like cat? But it doesn't seem very green. Currently our back porch is the stinky poop warehouse where scooped, bagged litter waits for the biweekly trash pick up. ew. So, we are going to try bagging the prizes and putting them in a big plastic container while they wait. But, I am still looking for a better way: less stinky, and greener. We currently use Arm and Hammer, which comes in a big, heavy weight cardboard box. We have tried greener litter, and the cats don't like it, plus the odor control is an issue, even with frequent scooping.

a) Is there a litter that is similar to Arm & Hammer Multi Cat, but that comes in a paper bag?
b) What do you know about other options for cat waste? I like the idea of the cat learning to use the toilet, but I've heard that in some states (CA?) this is illegal, for environmental reasons. What are those reasons? Is it better to go this route and thereby avoid the good/bad litter debate? Or would we just be polluting the sewage system by doing this?

Seems to me that training the cat to use the toilet would help us avoid having to use the plastic bags at all, help with the odor problem, help with the never-ending resolution to keep the boxes nicer for the cats. But. I don't want to be the person putting something toxic into the system, if it won't work with current sewage treatment methods....