We Love the Litter Genie Plus Cat Litter Pail, But We Have Three Wishes

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A clean litter box is essential to the well-being of your cat (and your nostrils).

If the box is constantly full, your pet might avoid nature's call as long as possible, which can result in serious health problems. Your cat may also be inclined to take their business elsewhere, which is stressful for everyone.

Scooping daily is the rule of thumb, but transferring those scoops to the trash gets messy. And for many, this is a chore that's all too easily ignored—until the box turns seriously gross.

When I was much younger and living in my first apartment, I had a bad habit of not scooping. This led to my cat developing a UTI because he didn't want to use his box. We got him back to full health quickly, but I was horrified that my laziness had caused my pet pain. Keeping the litter box as clean as possible at all times became essential to me, and now, the Litter Genie Plus makes an unpleasant—but vital—process infinitely easier.

The Litter Genie Plus allows you to scoop dirty litter into an odor-trapping pail, eliminating daily trash trips.

The Litter Genie Plus is essentially a small diaper pail (it was, in fact, developed by the Diaper Genie folks). Instead of transporting clumps of cat excrement to the trash every day (which quickly stinks up a garbage can, even if you’re disposing of the waste inside smaller bags), you simply scoop directly into the 17-by-8-by-8-inch container's bag-lined funnel. Pull the handle, and the mess vanishes into a smell-proof plastic liner below.

Once the bag is full, flip the pail open, cut off the top of the bag using the pail's built-in blade, tie it shut, unfurl a new length of liner from the cartridge, and tie it off at the bottom.

A cartridge contains 14 feet of liner and is advertised to last about two months in a single-cat household. In my two-cat household, we usually need to empty the pail about once a week. Because the liners are thick and the cartridges are custom fit, the pail holds in odors extremely well.

If you can't swing the liners financially, or you run out and have no replacements on hand, a kitchen trash bag works fine (though it does tend to let odors escape more readily, so you may want to change the bag more often). It's worth it to comparison-shop for refill packs. I usually buy a three-pack of Target's Up & Up Litter Pail Refills because they generally cost around the same as a two-pack of the official Litter Genie refills. But I often see the three-pack of the Litter Genie–brand bags on Amazon for around the same price.

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These refill bags are an economical alternative to the name-brand refill packs, and they fit securely into the Litter Genie.

Emptying a full Litter Genie isn't pleasant—the bag gets heavy enough that you’ll marvel at the wonders of biology. But I’ll happily take five minutes of ick once a week over a daily dose. I needed to watch an instructional video the first couple of times I added a new cartridge, but it's simple once you get the hang of it.

Still, there are three tweaks the Litter Genie Plus could make to improve its product. Here are three issues we’ve encountered, along with hacks for working around each one.

Changing a full bag requires opening the pail from its center, and the hinge allows the top half to drop all the way to the floor. Since the lid at the top of the pail doesn't fully latch, any stray litter that's caught in the funnel scatters on your floor. Propping the top half of the pail against a wall will keep the top lid in place as you work.

The Litter Genie Plus comes with a flimsy plastic scooper that snapped while trying to dislodge a heavy urine clump. I recommend upgrading to a metal scoop with deep sides. Unfortunately, our scoop pick, the DurAnimals DuraScoop Original Cat Litter Scoop, is too wide to fit in the Litter Genie's attached holder. I use an inexpensive metal scoop from Up & Up instead. One long-term Litter Genie Plus user told me that after a couple of years, her scoop holder is no longer secure and gets knocked off easily.

This inexpensive metal litter scoop has a comfortable-to-hold handle and easy-sifting slots.

Some consumers have reported that when they’re extracting the first section of a liner from a new cartridge, the plastic starts in the center of the roll, instead of the end. This effectively turns the roll into a closed loop and causes each bag to be double-lined, making the cartridge run out in half the time. Sometimes you can find the end of the roll buried near the center by digging around inside the cartridge, but that's frustrating.

The good news is that Litter Genie is aware of this problem, and a customer service agent told me that the company will replace a defective cartridge; contact Litter Genie at (877) 876-8687. You will be asked for the serial number, the date-made stamped on the cartridge, and a photo "so we may forward this information to the manufacturer to prevent future mishaps."

Despite these annoyances, I can't imagine my life without the Litter Genie. And to quote almost every vet I’ve ever spoken with about litter boxes, you wouldn't want to use a toilet that hasn't been flushed, and neither does your cat.

This article was edited by Annemarie Conte.

Joshua Lyon

Lead Editor

Joshua Lyon is the supervising editor of emergency-preparation and home-improvement topics at Wirecutter. He has written and edited for numerous outlets, including Country Living, Modern Farmer, The New York Times, V and VMAN, Marie Claire, Jane, and Food Network Magazine. He's also a Lambda Literary Award–nominated author and ghostwriter. Learn more at jklyon.com.

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