At Recompose in Seattle, families can perform a funeral service known as an “interment” before the body is ready for composting. In this photo, a demonstration mannequin stands in for the body. The remains will then be moved to a composting bin in an adjacent building and surrounded by wood chips, alfalfa and straw to begin the 30-40 day process.
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At Recompose in Seattle, families can perform a funeral service known as an “interment” before the body is ready for composting. In this photo, a demonstration mannequin stands in for the body. The remains will then be moved to a composting bin in an adjacent building and surrounded by wood chips, alfalfa and straw to begin the 30-40 day process.
April Dembosky/KQED
When Dennis Cunningham was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he wanted his death to reflect the values he lived by. As a civil rights lawyer, Cunningham defended the Black Panthers, AIDS protesters, and later Earth First environmental activists.
“He was a deep environmental activist,” said his son Joe Melis.
In his spare time, Cunningham created sculptures from driftwood, bottle caps, and rusted car parts in his San Francisco backyard studio. He wanted his body to be part of that same cycle of decline and rebirth.
He instructed his children to compost him after he died.
“It was completely in line with his personality of not creating waste and using waste,” said Cunningham's daughter, Miranda Melis.
For Cunningham, being turned into dirt and spread out on the forest floor to fertilize new trees was far more appealing than being burned to ashes or buried underground in a concrete crypt.
Similarly, more Americans are seeking more environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional burial and cremation. Human composting is the newest option.
But that's not the case everywhere, or even in most states. When Cunningham died on March 5, 2022, at his son's home in Los Angeles, there were no options.
“It's literally illegal to compost a body in California,” said son Joe Melis. “To do this, we had to transport his body from California to Washington.”
So far, seven states have legalized human composting, including Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Nevada, Vermont, and New York. It took California lawmakers three tries to pass a similar bill, but it won't go into effect until 2027.
Opposition primarily comes from religious groups, which consider human composting to be “immoral” and highlight the lack of research proving the practice is safe and beneficial for the environment. There is.
Nevertheless, lawmakers defended the bill, saying it would be better than burning fossil fuels for cremations, cutting down rainforest mahogany to make coffins, or spraying cemetery lawns with pesticides. also argued that natural decomposition processes are inherently superior.
A new type of funeral business
Cunningham ended up at Recompose, a human composting facility in Seattle. Founder and CEO Katrina Spade said about 15% of customers come from California and another 14% from other states.
“We'll pick you up at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport,” she said, referring to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
The Gathering Space is a room in Recompose where families can conduct worship and rituals for their loved ones. In this photo, a demonstration mannequin stands in for the body.
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The Gathering Space is a room in Recompose where families can conduct worship and rituals for their loved ones. In this photo, a demonstration mannequin stands in for the body.
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Walking into Recompose's lobby feels like entering a spa. Meditation music whispers from hidden speakers. Living art tapestries decorate the walls. Earthy shades of green and yellow cover the windows.
“When the light shines in, I hope they remember the light in the forest,” Spade said as she walked through the gathering space, a ceremonial room where families can perform prayers and rituals for their loved ones. he said.
The science of human composting
The composting itself takes place in a cavernous warehouse that Spade calls a “greenhouse.” She describes the smell as alternating with the smell of grassy meadows after a rain and the smell of barnyard grass. Inside the warehouse, 34 white hexagonal cylinders, or individual containers, are stacked together in the shape of a honeycomb.
When a new body comes in, Spade said, staff places it inside one of the bins on a bed of wood chips, alfalfa and straw, then covers it with more of the same.
“If you're alive, you're probably going to be a little itchy,” Spade said.
It's a natural process in which microorganisms and bacteria work inside the body to generate heat, increasing the temperature inside the container to 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Washington state regulations require this natural heat to be maintained for three consecutive days to kill pathogens that could contaminate the soil.
Composting bins arranged in a honeycomb array at the Recompose Human Composting Facility in Seattle, Washington.
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Composting bins arranged in a honeycomb array at the Recompose Human Composting Facility in Seattle, Washington.
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“I've been doing this for seven or eight years now, and I still see temperatures soaring and think, 'Oh my god!'” Spade channeled her inner eighth-grade science fair nerd. . “Even though it's natural, it feels like a miracle.”
The body remains in the container for approximately 30 to 40 days. Once a week or so, the staff rotates the car to let air flow through it, and the car deforms and hardens into a cube of dark brown dirt, big enough to fill the bed of a pickup truck.
During the process, staff remove the remaining titanium hips and knees, grind the bones into sand, and mix them back into the soil.
The entire process takes about two months and costs about $7,000, according to data collected by the consumer website Funeralocity. This is higher than the cost of cremation, but lower than a full-service conventional burial with a cemetery plot.
Spade argues that from an environmental perspective, composting is far better than both because it doesn't use resources such as fossil fuels, rainforest wood or land. She asked environmental engineer Troy Hottle to crunch the numbers and found that composting saves more than a ton of carbon compared to alternatives.
Another study by Dutch researchers at Leiden University, also commissioned by Recompose, found that composting has similar environmental benefits.
Human synthesis sparks innovation and opposition
State Rep. Cristina Garcia, a Democrat from Bell Gardens, said that during the deadliest period of the coronavirus pandemic, so many people were being cremated in California that the exhaust gas was It was said to be a violation of air district regulations.
This is part of what led her to introduce AB 351, a bill that would legalize human composting in California. The bill is expected to pass the state Legislature in 2022 and go into effect in 2027, giving regulators time to prepare.
“The pandemic has exacerbated the situation and reminded us of the importance of the choices we make throughout the life cycle,” Garcia told KQED after signing the bill. “It added to the sense of urgency.”
Despite minimal and muted opposition to human composting, it took three attempts over three Congresses for lawmakers to pass the bill.
The California Catholic Conference has raised concerns about the safety of composted remains, and said the bill's supporters relied on just one small, non-peer-reviewed study in Recompose to explain the effects of dental implants and chemotherapy. He pointed out that all toxic elements in the body, such as, are claimed to be safe. Treatment was appropriately excluded.
The bishops also argued that it is immoral to compost human bodies and scatter the remains. “There is a risk that people may unknowingly step on bodies,” the Catholic Conference said in a statement, adding, “Repeated dispersal in the same area is tantamount to mass graves.”
But Recompose's Spade said her company composts many Catholics.
“I've had priests bless bodies before,” she said. “Then we had the priests bless the soil.”
Some liberal rabbis are considering how human composting could comply with Jewish death-care rituals, according to Courtney Applewhite, who has studied religious responses to humans. , “Some people are creating liturgies and creating words to say in relation to this kind of process.” During his doctoral studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he worked on composting.
After composting: rest areas and rituals
Composting helped Joe and Miranda Merris as they grieved after the death of their father. Most of his soil was spread out on the forest floor in southwest Washington. The rest went under a beloved hemlock tree on the family's land in Michigan.
Some children kept their own compost. Joe has a box in his home office in Los Angeles. Miranda buried some of it in the woods behind her home in Olympia. In Washington, human compost can be spread anywhere as long as the landowner says it's okay. California plans to follow suit.
“This tree is a climbing maple,'' said Miranda, dodging spider webs and ducking under low, thin, moss-covered branches that arched in all directions. He chose this location because he felt it was “parent-like.''
On December 20, 2023, in Olympia, Washington, Miranda Melis, who composted some of her father's remains for burial, tends to the altar she built behind her home.
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On December 20, 2023, in Olympia, Washington, Miranda Melis, who composted some of her father's remains for burial, tends to the altar she built behind her home.
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She knelt next to a small altar she had built on roots, tending to a small bowl of stones and shells her father had collected and a jagged crystal surrounded by a ring of pine cones.
“I meditate here and sometimes I talk to him here. I think of this place as a kind of phone booth to the afterlife,” she said. “I can hear his voice as if I were sitting next to him.”
She said that her father's presence here, the feeling of his body being given back to the earth, all somehow eased the pain of the loss. That made her less afraid of her own death.
“A lot of things happened and I thought, 'I want to do this too,'” she said.
Both Miranda and Joe say they want their bodies to be composted when they die.
This article is based on NPR's Health Reporting Partnership. KQED and KFF Health News.
