Composting Humans is Now Legal in These US States

"This can’t be right. But he’d be wrong to think that, because these days our nearest and dearest can be composted and end up in the garden. It’s a fact, and one some parts of the church and a lot of other people in the US are not over the moon about."

- The Infographics Show

Composting Humans is Now Legal in These US States is a video on the Infographics Show explaining the phenomenon of composting humans and how they are now legal in a few states of the US, and how churches and many other people are protesting against this act.

Synopsis
Composting has become more popular the last few years, but we're not talking about the kind of composting you're thinking of. Check out today's insane new video to learn all about human composting, the controversial new way of disposing of your loved ones. Instead of being cremated or buried in a casket, can become part of a tree!

Transcript
A guy is scrolling through Facebook and he sees those dreaded letters, “R.I.P.” It’s his beloved great Uncle Morty, the ancient hippy who’d once been a roadie for The Grateful Dead. Except, instead of reading the lines, “The cremation will take place at…” Or “The burial service will be on…” He reads, “Morty will be composted in our backyard” on such and such a date. What?! Thinks the guy, old Morty is going where the corn husks go? This can’t be right. But he’d be wrong to think that, because these days our nearest and dearest can be composted and end up in the garden. It’s a fact, and one some parts of the church and a lot of other people in the US are not over the moon about.

Ok, so we need to clear some things up before any of you get any ideas about seeing how much space you have in your garden’s compost heap. There’s quite a lot more to human composting than tossing your grandpa into a pile of rotten apples and old potato peelings. Back in 2019, when some people got wind of Washington State legalizing this kind of eco-burial they weren’t too pleased about it. The Washington State Catholic Conference stepped up and said it was totally against it, calling it an undignifying act. Others were quick to say if you bury your grandfather right where you grow your vegetables, won’t that mean that at some point you’ll be eating the old guy? Isn’t that a form of passive cannibalism?

First, let’s have a look at a place called Herland Forest which is located in Washington state. It calls itself, a “Natural Burial Cemetery”, a place where dead bodies can re-join the “circle of life.” There they’ve been composting certain animals such as sheep and goats for a long time, but dead humans have lately come on to the scene. They do something called “natural organic reduction”, which actually just means composting but it tends not to freak people out as much as the word composting does. It means putting the dead body in a kind of vessel, like a tube, that is full of organic matter that will help break down the body. The cylinder is rolled back and forth over time, helping the body to slowly turn into soil.

They provided photos of this, but of course, they didn’t use the real body of the deceased person. Instead, they used a living person just to give you an idea of what it looks like. Basically, a body lies in the cylinder on top of a load of wood chips and other organic matter such as straw and alfalfa. They track the temperature, because the body must remain at a temperature of at least 131 F (55 C) and stay like that for three days. Natural bacteria in humans help the breakdown process, but the people at this natural burial cemetery speed it up by adding their own bacteria, protozoa, and fungi. There’s a bit more to the process, but all you really need to know is that the body becomes mulch usually in three to seven weeks. The outcome is about two barrow loads of nutrient-rich soil.

You might ask, why? Why would anyone choose this method of disposal? Well, it’s eco-friendly, say the adherents to the process, and it’s also not very expensive. The average cost of a burial in the US is somewhere between $8,000 and $12,000, with one consumer index saying the cost has gone up 227.1% in the last three decades. Dying isn’t cheap and burial takes up lots of space. We went online and morbidly checked out the cost of caskets. You can pick up a “Wood Casket Cherry Finish with Ivory Velvet Interior” for just $1,350, but if you’re looking to turn heads at a funeral you might go for the “Luxury Platinum Copper” casket which will set you back almost $3,500. Even a boring old pine box is $800 on some websites. So, with all the other expenses, services fees, director fee, ceremony fee, you’re looking at an expensive day out.

Cremation is a bit cheaper, but then you’re not going to help all those flowers and vegetables grow and the process will also release carbon dioxide and mercury into the atmosphere. At around $5,000, human composting is about the same price as cremation. Sounds good, and we imagine in a few more minutes it’s an option you might be interested in for when you shuffle off this mortal coil. There’s something called “The Urban Death Project”. This is an idea relating to transforming what we do with the dead. The leaders of the project say they want to build a “Recomposition Center” in the city of Seattle. What this could mean is the composted dead end up going into the ground where a park is built. People just become part of the natural environment, rather than get turned into ashes and sit atop someone’s fireplace or take up space in the ground in a graveyard.

The supporters of this project say it’s something that should have happened long ago, given how much wood is used to make coffins and how many gallons of chemicals are used in embalming. It adds up to a lot given that dying is a day-to-day formality. The total materials used in the US each year to bury and cremate people according to that project is “30 million board-feet of hardwood, 90,000 tons of steel, 1.6 million tons of concrete, and millions of gallons of formaldehyde-laden embalming fluid.” Ok, so what about all those drugs people have taken in their lifetime? Do they taint the soil? What about those parts of the body that aren’t organic, such as tooth fillings and artificial hips? The pro-composters say they take out those bits, and whatever drugs were in the person’s system or any other toxins are removed during the process.

As for the bits of bone left behind, they will be picked out by hand. If you listen to these people, you might think, wow, why did this never happen before? It sounds like a win-win for everyone besides people involved with the business of death. You can be sure to hear a lot of pushback from them, it’s how they earn their crust in an industry that’s presently worth over $21 billion. Still, it seems more US states want to make human composting legal. In 2021, the New York Times reported that Colorado could become the second state for it to happen. A bill was introduced by State Representative Brianna Titone who said she was “excited” about what she saw after learning a bit about human composting. California could also soon follow suit and there are bills that have been introduced in New York and Oregon in support of the process. Still, nothing much happened lately because of COVID, but now things might move forward.

As for compost being used to grow food in your garden, the bill in Colorado states that the soil can’t be used for that or even for growing food anywhere else. While it doesn’t really matter if a stranger eats a vegetable that grew in some soil that had once partly been a human, it’s a turn-off for some people. Colorado would also make it illegal to sell the compost, for any purposes. In the end, it would all be used for public land. Still, it seems in Washington at least, the family can take the soil home with them and use it in their own garden. Let’s face it, for some people being able to feed the ones you left behind could be seen as an act of kindness. Not everyone agrees, of course. Many politicians right now support this kind of burial and have said it’s a sign of the times that people want to join that natural cycle again after they die.

Others have voted against human composting, saying it just isn’t normal, that it’s a loss of dignity for the dead. At the end of the day, there’s a growing consensus that a person should have the right to choose for themselves what happens after they die. As for the Catholic Church, one archdiocesan said when he first heard about human composting he thought it was a joke. When he realized it wasn’t, his reaction was that it was a travesty for the deceased. In an interview, he said, “We don't 'dispose' of human remains. We take care of them in great reverence in anticipation of the resurrection.” He said that the Catholic church also asks people not to scatter the remains of the deceased in the form of ashes for the very reason that they are a body in another form.

If you throw them into the sea, that body would be all over the place. It’s the same reason he doesn’t like the idea of composting a person. In Washington, what’s seen by some as a progressive form of burial really rankled local bishops. In a statement, they said, “In memory of the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, the mystery that illumines the Christian meaning of death, burial is above all the most fitting way to reflect faith and hope in the resurrection of the body.” The argument being, if someone ends up being part-carrot can they really go to heaven? They also asked for more research into how this might affect the environment and public health. Others stated that greener types of traditional burials are also happening these days, but still, this kind of thing doesn’t happen that often. In the UK, you can opt for a green burial, which means being buried without embalming taking place and the coffin is made from materials that biodegrade fast.

Then you just become part of the land where the wildlife roam. This is still a long way from human composting, though. As for what funeral directors think about it, one of them told the LA times this: “It’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of.” He commented on how he thought the bones wouldn’t break down and that the price wasn’t exactly in line with thriftiness. Nonetheless, from what we’ve read, there’s likely a good chance that in the future many of you will opt to be composted. Just think about it, back in the 1960s only about three percent of people in the US chose to be cremated, and that’s gone up to around fifty percent now. In the past, quite a lot of people – despite the fact they’d be dead – didn’t like the idea of being incinerated.

They and their families also hoped to get them to heaven in one piece. Things have changed. Fewer people believe you have to be in one piece to get there if they believe in heaven at all. Still, talking about human composting, people have pointed out that the words “human composting” are not all that pleasant to the ears. That’s why some proponents are calling it “natural organic reduction” and other nicer-sounding terms. There are currently at least three operators doing this in Washington, but you can expect more will come soon. As for what the public think, one funeral director told the press, “We get calls all over the country, actually all over the world, to see what is happening right here in Washington.” One country they won’t be getting calls from is Sweden, because it’s been happening there for around 15 years already.