As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, my family has several pets, and two of those pets, a guinea pig and a rabbit, have a litter box and a cage that need to be emptied on a regular basis. Because of the volume of material (primarily wood shavings) that needs to be disposed of, we do not put it in the trash, instead, we dump it in a kind of compost pile that has formed behind our barn. Our house and barn are surrounded by forest, and behind the barn, at the edge of the treeline, is a steep hill. The compost/litter pile is at that edge.
Some of the aspects that make it ‘appropriate’ for this purpose are its distance from our house and the fact that it cannot be seen from the house or the road. A non-human aspect of the space is that it is on the edge of the steep drop and the woods. I think if that edge weren’t there, we would not use that spot because it would be like leaving a pile of stuff in the middle of a space. Somehow having the pile at the edge (the margins) of a space feels less disruptive and wrong than having it in the middle of the space. Perhaps this is because having material waste collect somewhere that is not an edge or a margin could be thought of as a waste of space.