by Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist (read the original in Noozhawk by clicking here)
There’s something fitting about an environmental entrepreneur named Spade and a soil scientist named Bogg working on an alternative burial process based on composting.
“Composting makes people think of banana peels and coffee grounds,” says Katrina Spade. “Our bodies have nutrients. What if we could grow new life after we’ve died?” Spade is the founder and CEO of Recompose, a public benefit corporation in Seattle.
According to Recompose’s website, the organization’s goal is to use “nature’s principles to return us to the earth, sequestering carbon and improving soil health.” The company calculates the carbon savings at more than a metric ton per person compared to traditional systems.
“By converting human remains into soil, we avoid wasting materials, avoid polluting groundwater with embalming fluid, and prevent the emissions of CO2 from cremation and from the manufacturing of caskets, headstones, and grave liners,” Recompose says.
Besides the environmental benefits, Recompose argues that choosing to return to soil after death “helps to strengthen our relationship to the natural cycles and helps us become stewards of the earth.”
Spade, an architect by training, created a design for the facility where it hopes to offer burial services. The building would be centered on a three-story vault called the core. Each body would settle down within the core during the initial stages of composting.
The core could hold about 30 corpses at a time in different stages of composting. Recompose estimates each body, along with composting wood chips, alfalfa or sawdust, would yield enough compost to fill a 3-foot cube.
Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, a soil scientist at Washington State University, serves on Recompose’s advisory board.
She describes the process as a simple procedure of placing the deceased inside a mound of carbon-rich material like wood chips or sawdust and making adjustments such as adding moisture or extra nitrogen.
Microbial activity starts the pile cooking. The temperature, which reaches around 140 degrees, kills common pathogens.
In addition to the environmental benefits, Recompose cites spiritual ones like connecting death to the cycle of nature. Conventional burial, using carcinogens in the embalming fluid or cremation the body at 2000 degrees, is anything but natural.
Other investigators are researching alternatives such as burial suits and reef balls.
With the Infinity burial suit, the body is wrapped in a shroud or outfit of organic material woven with a mix of mycelia and other micro-organisms. Fungi aid in decomposing the body and neutralizing body toxins; nutrients are transferred back to the earth.
Reef balls are concrete ocean structures designed to hold cremated remains and attract aquatic plants and animals. Besides reef propagation, they also function as breakwaters.
Even traditional mortuaries are expanding their views. Jeff Jorgenson, owner of Elemental Cremation and Burial, describes itself as Seattle’s “only green funeral home.”
“We’re in it to change an industry,” says Jorgenson. “There’s a kinder, gentler, less expensive way, and that’s what we’re all doing.”
According to Jorgenson, sustainable burial practices are still part of a boutique market, though that doesn’t change his bottom line.
“Death is difficult. People don’t really want to experiment with mom,” he says. “But I count myself fortunate to be out there as one of the people that offers these alternatives, should someone want them.”
With ideas like these coalescing around working with the earth’s cycle, Spade (and others) are helping to turn and return to the earth.
Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist
Karen Telleen-Lawton is an eco-writer, sharing information and insights about economics and ecology, finances and the environment. Having recently retired from financial planning and advising, she spends more time exploring the outdoors — and reading and writing about it. The opinions expressed are her own.