There is a moment in a conversation with Spencer Williams that quietly explains the whole company. He is talking from his office at West Paw’s headquarters in Bozeman, Montana, and behind him, through a glass wall, is the manufacturing line. Not a stock photo of a manufacturing line. The actual one, running, making the toys.
That glass wall is not a design flourish. It is the argument.
Because the thing that separates West Paw from the enormous field of pet brands with a sustainability page is that West Paw’s sustainability is a process, not a claim. The recycling does not happen at some vendor three countries away. It happens roughly thirty feet behind the founder’s desk, where a used dog toy is ground up, cleaned, and turned back into a new one.
You can outsource a lot of things. You cannot outsource that.
The close-the-loop toy
The flagship line is Zogoflex, introduced 18 years ago, and the brief it was built against is worth stating because it explains what is wrong with the rest of the aisle.
Williams’s read on the competition is blunt: the typical dog toy carries heavy metals, BPA, and phthalates, and then, at the end of its life, goes into landfill because nothing about it was ever designed to be reclaimed. Zogoflex was drawn up against exactly that. The requirements were that it had to last, had to be safe to chew, had to be made in the United States, and had to be genuinely recoverable through a real closed loop.
That last word is doing real work. “Recyclable” is a word almost anything can claim in theory and almost nothing achieves in practice, because the infrastructure to actually take the thing back does not exist. Here it does: any Zogoflex toy can be recycled through retailers or sent directly back to West Paw, where it is ground up, cleaned, and remade into new toys. In the building. Behind the glass.
The newer Seaflex line goes at the problem from the other end, using around 11 percent ocean-bound plastic. Note the specific phrasing, which matters and which the brand is careful about: ocean-bound. This is plastic captured on land, before it reaches the water, cleaned up and put back into a product. Fishing plastic out of the ocean is a much worse deal than never letting it get there.
Who these toys are right for: power chewers, and anyone who has watched a plush toy become confetti in ninety seconds. The honest tradeoff: hard rubber toys are not the right pick for a soft-mouthed dog who wants to carry something around and cuddle it. And no toy is truly indestructible; check any rubber toy regularly for chunks missing, because a swallowed chunk is a surgery.
The treats came from a slaughterhouse floor, and that is the point
The most interesting thing West Paw makes is arguably not a toy.
Williams was raised on a ranch and does not soften his view of the American food system: he thinks it is broken, and he points at the gap between soaring beef prices and the ranchers who see almost none of that money. Walking the cutting-room floors of slaughterhouses across Montana and Wyoming, he kept noticing the same thing. The organs were being discarded. Perfectly good protein, grown at a genuine environmental cost, thrown out, and the producer eating the loss on it.
That waste stream is now the first ingredient in the treats. West Paw’s treats are built primarily on organ meat: heart, liver, and lungs from bison, beef, and turkey. The rest of the sourcing runs on the same principle throughout, natural ingredients, raised humanely, sourced sustainably, and originating in the U.S.
This is the smartest idea in the company, and it is smart for a reason that has nothing to do with virtue. Organ meat is not a compromise ingredient that dogs put up with for the planet’s sake. Organ meat is the good stuff. It carries nutrients muscle meat simply does not, and dogs lose their minds over it. Williams reports that his Poodle, Niko, will do literally anything for a bison lung, and that the appearance of one converts him instantly into the most obedient animal in North America.
A sustainability initiative that makes the product better is not a sacrifice. It is a business.
What being a B Corp actually means
West Paw became certified as a B Corp in 2013, the first pet product manufacturer to do it, and it is worth understanding what that certification is, because the term gets thrown around loosely.
Certification requires a score of at least 80 out of a possible 200, awarded across five areas of impact: Governance, Workers, Community, Environment, and Customers. This is not a green sticker. It is an audit of the whole business, and the environmental portion is only a fifth of the grade.
Williams’s reason for pursuing it is more strategic than sentimental, and he says so. A single small manufacturer in Montana can be forgiven for wondering whether anything it does registers at all. Joining a certification movement is a way of borrowing scale you do not otherwise have.
The same instinct produced the Pet Sustainability Coalition, which he helped found and which supplies resources and consulting to push the industry along. Eight companies started it. Membership now runs to roughly 175, from Petco at one end down to small independent retailers at the other.
There is something worth noticing here. A company that genuinely wanted a marketing advantage from being green would keep the playbook to itself. West Paw’s founder spent his effort building the thing that teaches competitors to catch up.
The company is 25 years old and traces back five generations
West Paw got its start in 1996, but the family story behind it runs back through five generations of Williamses living and working in Montana.
The origin is disarmingly small. Williams had decided he was moving home to Montana, and manufacturing drew him specifically because of what a factory can do for the town around it. He and his then-fiancée, now his wife, were besotted with their chocolate Lab. Then a friend mentioned a local woman who had spent years sewing cat and dog toys and was ready to sell the business. Here was a chance to be taught the trade by someone who already had it, and he took it with both hands.
Ask him what comes next and the answer is conspicuously unglamorous. Keep manufacturing in Montana. Keep growing. Nudge the rest of the industry toward doing the same, if possible. And build something that lasts, because twenty-five years are behind them and he intends the next twenty-five to be the strong ones.
Williams’s advice for actually lowering your pet’s footprint
Ask him where a pet owner should start and he does not say “buy my toys,” which is to his credit. He ranks it.
1. Food, first, because it dwarfs everything else. Nothing else about your animal comes close to what they eat, in environmental terms. So the question to ask yourself is whether it is possible to feed something raised sustainably and organically. And it does not have to be all or nothing. Williams suggests converting only half the bowl to start, running the new food and the old one side by side. The bonus is that a more natural diet usually happens to be better for the animal too.
2. Accessories, second. Finding gear that is either made of recycled material or can itself be recycled no longer requires a research project. The bar has dropped. Step over it.
3. Packaging, third, and this is the one nobody thinks about. Most food and treat bags are a multi-layer resin. There will be a foil layer in there to trap the fats, and a polyethylene layer, or something like it, bonded to it. That lamination is exactly what condemns the bag, because no recycling stream can pull those layers apart again. What Williams tells people to look for instead is a single-layer resin, a switch West Paw itself made recently.
That third tip is the kind of thing you only learn from someone who has actually had to source packaging, and it is the most useful sentence in this article. The next time you are standing in an aisle wondering whether a brand’s eco claims are real, turn the bag over and feel the material. A crinkly, foil-lined, multi-layer pouch with a leaf printed on it is telling you two contradictory things, and only one of them is true.
References
- B Lab. “About B Corp Certification and the B Impact Assessment.” https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/certification/
- Pet Sustainability Coalition. “About and membership.” https://petsustainability.org/
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “Plastics: Material-Specific Data.” https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-and-recycling/plastics-material-specific-data
- Ocean Conservancy. “Stemming the Tide: Land-based strategies for a plastic-free ocean.” https://oceanconservancy.org/
- Wisdom, S. et al. “Bisphenol A and phthalates in consumer plastics: exposure pathways.” Environmental Health Perspectives. https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/
