How Much Cat Litter Does it Take to Cover Cleveland? This story-problem drawing calculates how many domestic cats it would take to generate enough used clay cat litter to cover the city of Cleveland with a one-inch layer. The question is absurd on its face, but it serves a deeper purpose: establishing a unit of measure to compare domestic sediment logistics to glacial ones. Cleveland sits atop roughly 1,700 feet of glacial till, much of it clay, pushed here by the Laurentide Ice Sheet over thousands of years. This drawing asks whether the global supply chain for cat litter, routed through strip mines, packaging plants, and big-box pet retailers, can move anywhere near the volume of clay once mobilized by ice. The use of cat litter and the slow repetition of discarding it in landfills unfolds a new kind of sedimentation for the distribution of place via virtual nutrient flow of clay minerals, and I’ve got the math to prove it.