Why most cat scratchers
end up in landfill.

Walk into any pet shop and the scratching post aisle tells you a lot — rows of carpeted columns, sisal-wrapped tubes, cardboard pads and plush play towers. Most are priced between £8 and £40. Most will be in a bin within six months.

This isn't an accident. The traditional cat scratcher is built on a quiet assumption: that the whole product — post, base, covering — is disposable. When the surface wears down, you don't think about repairing it. You think about replacing it. And a new one goes back on your shopping list.

We spent a long time thinking about why that is, and whether it had to be.

The actual lifecycle of a typical scratcher

Most scratchers on the market share a similar construction: a central post (usually MDF or softwood) wrapped in sisal rope or synthetic carpet, bonded with adhesive to a weighted base, often upholstered in the same material. The whole assembly is built as a single unit.

The problem is that the thing your cat actually interacts with — the scratching surface — degrades at a fundamentally different rate to everything else. A solid wooden post could last decades. The sisal or carpet covering it typically shows significant wear within three to six months of regular use. But because the covering is bonded to the structure, you can't separate them.

So when the surface wears out, you don't replace the surface. You replace everything.

Those figures add up to a quiet but significant waste stream. Across millions of households in the UK alone, that's an enormous volume of largely intact structural material — wood, MDF, rubber bases — being discarded because the few centimetres of fibre around them has worn through.

What most scratchers are actually made of

When we started looking at what goes into standard scratchers, a few things stood out. First, the wood. Most use MDF (medium-density fibreboard) or low-grade softwood — materials that, while functional, are often bonded with resins and adhesives that make them difficult or impossible to recycle. They go straight to landfill.

Second, the surface material. Sisal is a natural fibre and composted correctly, it will break down. But in practice, sisal rope is usually wound tightly around posts and glued in place. Separating it for responsible disposal requires time and effort that most people simply don't invest. And carpet-covered scratchers are often made from synthetic fibres that won't biodegrade at all.

Third — and perhaps most significantly — many scratchers include plastic components: bases, clips, rings, hanging toys. These fragments of plastic are rarely collected for recycling. They're simply too small, too mixed-material, and too low-value for most waste streams to deal with.

None of this is a deliberate conspiracy by manufacturers. It's the natural result of designing for lowest unit cost rather than longest useful life. And for a long time, nobody particularly questioned it — because the numbers seemed to work. Cheap to make, cheap to buy, easy to replace.

The question we kept coming back to

When we started working on Culm, the central question we kept returning to was simple: what actually needs to be replaced?

The answer, when you look at it honestly, is just the scratching surface. The structural post doesn't degrade. The base doesn't wear out. The weight and footprint don't change. Only the surface does — and only because your cat is supposed to use it. That's the whole point.

So we designed Culm around that insight. A bamboo post — its culm walls naturally hollow, as all bamboo is — that's genuinely built to last. A natural jute sleeve that slides on and off, designed to be replaced when it's worn. The sleeve is the consumable. The post is the investment.

Why bamboo, specifically

We chose bamboo for the post for several reasons. It's one of the fastest-growing plants on earth — some species grow close to a metre per day — which means it can be harvested at scale without the long replanting cycles required by hardwoods. Bamboo culm is naturally hollow — the plant's strength comes from its dense, fibrous outer walls rather than solid infill. Those walls are structurally harder than most softwoods and substantially more resistant than MDF. The post won't flex, splinter, or degrade in a typical indoor environment. And it has a natural, warm aesthetic that sits well in a modern home.

Bamboo also feels honest in a way that MDF doesn't. It's a material you can pick up and know immediately that it was grown, not manufactured. That matters to us — not as a marketing claim, but as a design principle. We wanted a post that people would instinctively feel good about having in their home.

What we're still working on

We want to be transparent about where we are. Culm is in prototype. We haven't solved every sustainability question — nobody has. The jute sleeves need to be packaged, shipped, and disposed of at end of life, and we're still refining the most responsible way to handle that. We're developing a freepost returns programme so that worn sleeves can come back to us rather than going to landfill. We're looking at compostable packaging.

But the fundamental architecture — replace the surface, keep the post — is sound. And we think it's a meaningful improvement on the disposable model that currently dominates the market. That's where we started. We'll keep improving from there.

If that approach resonates with you, we'd love to have you on the waitlist.