As a 30-year-old architecture student in 2013, Katrina Spade began to contemplate her own mortality. Specifically, what will happen to his body after he dies. Ms. Spade, who was then enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, was in the minority: Only a fifth of Americans plan their own funerals. Traditional burial, which 44% of Americans choose, didn’t feel right for her, nor did cremation, which has become the more popular option (see chart). Nor was a “natural burial” made, which although pleasantly green, would probably have required him to be put to rest outside his home city due to lack of space: New York City, for example, in 1851 at 86th Street. Burials were banned in Manhattan in the south. , She became increasingly appalled that “there were no urban ecological death-care options available”.
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Then came the brainwaves. If farmers can turn whole cows into manure, why not humans? A decade after presenting the idea in her master’s thesis, Ms. Spade now runs Recompose, a “human-composting” facility in Seattle. For many people, it’s a tough idea to chew. A body is placed in a vessel with woodchips, straw. , and alfalfa, which together form a warm environment of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and moisture. It is then left for twelve weeks, during which microbes help to break it down. It may all sound gruesome, but the process ends with a small mound of soil, which is then given back to the families and can be used to plant trees or nurture plants. Later this month, New York will become the sixth state to allow it.
The idea is not without its detractors. For religious groups with strict burial customs, this goes against core teachings. Edward Meekman, director of public policy for the Archdiocese of New York, argues that the Catholic Church’s belief in the “oneness of body and soul” renders the process humiliating, a “violation of dignity”. The state’s Catholic conference stated that while “human bodies are not household waste”, composting is “more suitable for vegetable trimmings and eggshells”.
However, the environmental benefits are clear. Every year, cemeteries across the country require vast amounts of steel and concrete to reinforce graves, as well as millions of liters of embalming fluid, which leach harmful chemicals into the ground. Meanwhile, the cremation of a corpse emits carbon-dioxide equivalent to driving about 750 kilometers in a car.
On the other hand, human compost is completely green. There are bills that are currently being considered to legalize it in five states, including Nevada, Minnesota, and Connecticut. There are several thousand people on the waiting list for Recompose from across the country, a quarter of whom are under the age of 49. While many people instinctively balk at the idea, the human-composting industry would appear to thrive in fertile soil.
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© 2023, The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved. From The Economist, published under license. Original content can be found at www.economist.com
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