Paper Shredder/Cat Litter Maker

Recently, identity theft has been in the news. By digging through rubbish bins, criminals can obtain people's details, and use those to obtain credit cards and the like, causing problems for their victims. Common advice is to destroy anything with your name and address on it, such as bills and bank statements, before throwing it out.

Meanwhile, a lot of people who keep cats at home have found that cat litter made of recycled paper is more efficient than the gravel variety, because of paper's odour-absorbing properties.

Recycling paper is efficient and helps reduce waste, but the round trip the paper makes from consumers' homes to processing facilities and back in the form of cat litter, toilet paper, and so on, uses resources such as fuel. Short-circuiting the process would conserve these resources.

Therefore, imagine the following device for the environmentally- and privacy-conscious cat owner. A small machine that looks a little like a paper shredder, only containing a chute under which a bag or bucket may be placed. Place some paper (bills, scrap paper, newspapers, whatever) in the intake slot at the top, press the button and it goes to work, shredding and pulping the paper, before reconstituting it into small pellets,. Shortly later, the pellets come out of the chute; instant environmentally-friendly cat litter.