Ultimate Recycling: Composting Humans

 Lisa Wells provides us with an intriguing new option for dealing with our remains after we pass away.  She produced the article To Be a Field of Poppies: The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost for Harper’s Magazine to acquaint us with this new development.

Wells is someone who has thought a lot about what should be done with her body after she is gone.

“As a child, I desperately wanted a Viking burial, an idea inspired by the 1988 Macaulay Culkin film Rocket Gibraltar, in which a group of kids boost their grandpa’s corpse, load it onto a boat, push it out to sea, and light it on fire with a flaming arrow. If the sky glowed red, the narrator explained, it meant the dead Viking had ‘led a good life’.”

“By my twenties, I had settled on the more realistic option of cremation. I wanted my ashes scattered on the banks of my favorite river, or cast from a cliff into the Pacific Ocean, or fired into the atmosphere from a cannon. (I was in a Hunter S. Thompson phase.) But after a friend’s ashes were lost in the mail, I reconsidered. I explored sky burial, in which a corpse is left out in the open to be fed upon by raptors; and alkaline hydrolysis, a process in which flesh is liquefied in a solution of water and potassium hydroxide. More recently, I planned to follow the example of Nineties heartthrob Luke Perry and purchase an Infinity Burial Suit: a shroud containing fungi that would consume my corpse and bioremediate its toxins.”

She suggests that such focusing on exiting the world is healthy and useful: we owe the world some consideration as to how to dispose of ourselves, it saves those who remain any uncertainty as to what to do with us, and consideration of our inevitable death should produce a greater appreciation for the life we have left.

“A willingness to face life’s nonnegotiable realities seems to me one mark of psychological maturation. But it comes at a price—the discovery that the world is not as simple as we once believed.”

“The Viking burial, for example, is apocryphal; the Vikings were known to burn their dead in boats, but kept them parked on land. What’s more, their funerals sometimes involved human sacrifice, in which a female slave was raped by the dead man’s clan, then ritually stabbed and strangled. Other, less sinister realities: both sky burial and the firing of heavy artillery are frowned upon in the city of Seattle, where I live. And even if cannons were permitted, cremation releases about 540 pounds of carbon per incinerated corpse. The carbon output from a year’s worth of cremations in the United States is roughly equivalent to that from burning 400 million pounds of coal. Alkaline hydrolysis has less ecological impact, but like cremation, it wastes the body’s energy; instead of going up in smoke, nutrients are flushed down the drain. Even the mushroom suit, according to critics, adds nothing to the decomposition process that soil itself can’t provide.”

In that spirit, our traditional burial six feet under can be considered as just a brutal mechanism to inject a carcinogen into mother earth.

“By the 1950s, embalming had become standard in the United States, but I wonder if this would have been the case had people understood the violence involved. There is no single method, but in a typical scenario, fluid containing formaldehyde is pumped into the carotid artery, which forces blood and other fluids in the corpse out of a tube in the jugular or femoral vein. An aspirating device resembling a meat thermometer is then repeatedly pushed into the abdomen and chest, where it punctures the organs. The organs are then filled with concentrated ‘cavity chemicals.’ No wonder embalming is considered desecration in some traditions, including among Muslims and Jews, who bury their dead in shrouds or simple coffins, sometimes without nails or fasteners, to avoid obstructing the decomposition process.” 

Wells centers her article around Amigo Bob Cantisano and his end-of-life decision.

“Amigo Bob didn’t know what should be done with his body. To bury toxic embalming fluid in the earth was out of the question—he was a lifelong environmentalist.”

“A few months earlier, in May 2020, a Washington State bill legalizing the conversion of human remains into soil, known as natural organic reduction (NOR), had gone into effect. A company called Recompose was due to open the world’s first NOR facility that December in Kent, a city just south of Seattle. They named it the Greenhouse. It seemed perfect for Amigo Bob, who had revolutionized the field of organic agriculture—first as a farmer, then as an advocate and consultant—and spent his life building soil and protecting it from the ‘pesticide mafia’.”

“When he began to accept that the end was near, Amigo Bob called the founder of Recompose, Katrina Spade. He wanted to make sure she knew what she was doing. Compost is the basis of organic farming, so he knew a lot about it—he’d even served as an adviser for a few large composting operations. Katrina explained their process, and he seemed to find her account convincing, but it wasn’t until his final moments that he told Jenifer [his wife] definitively: ‘This is what I want’.”

Amigo Bob would be one of the ten people who would become the first legally composted humans.  Proper composting requires a bit of technology.

“Composting isn’t rocket science, but the process requires a precise amount of sustained heat to eliminate pathogens and quickly convert decaying organic matter to soil.”

“Each of their bodies was placed inside an eight-foot-long steel cylinder called a ‘vessel,’ along with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. Over the next thirty days, the Recompose staff monitored the moisture, heat, and pH levels inside the vessels, occasionally rotating them, until the bodies transformed into soil. The soil was then transferred to curing bins, where it remained for two weeks before being tested for toxins and cleared for pickup.”

“Half of the NOR soil would wind up in a forest on Bells Mountain, in southwestern Washington, near the Oregon border. A composted body produces approximately one cubic yard of soil, which can fill a truck bed and weigh upwards of 1,500 pounds. For many surviving relatives—apartment dwellers, for example—taking home such a large quantity of soil is unrealistic, so Recompose offers them the option to donate it to the mountain, where it’s used to fertilize trees and repair land degraded by logging.”

“But Amigo Bob was a farmer, so Jenifer rented a U-Haul and brought the whole cubic yard of him home. She turned the trip into a kind of pilgrimage, stopping to visit loved ones and the headwaters of their favorite rivers. Over the next few months, their farmer friends came by and filled small containers with the soil to use on their own land. Jenifer used some to plant a cherry tree.”

It is not clear what the future of human composting will be.  It will seem an attractive option for the environmentally concerned.

“Recompose claims that each person who chooses composting over conventional burial or cremation will prevent an average of one metric ton of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. According to the EPA’s calculator, that is a modest carbon payback, equal to the consumption of about ten tanks of gas. On the other hand, this is preferable to adding to the debt.”

“To my mind, it’s the perceptual shift that bears the greatest promise. If we begin to imagine ourselves as beneficial contributors to the earth in death, rather than as agents of sickness and damage, maybe we can start to see that possibility for our lives.”

Wells quotes one of the Recompose participants, Elliot Rasenick.

“’The climate crisis is fundamentally a soil crisis,’ Elliot mused. ‘There is a poetry in the possibility that the death of one generation can make possible the life of the next’.”

Interest in this procedure extends beyond Washington state.

“…similar bills have been introduced in California, Vermont, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Colorado. The latter two have already passed.”

The reader who did not find this topic thought provoking might yet benefit from the time spent by considering who in our political firmament might better serve humanity as a cubic yard of dirt.

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.