Compost yourself

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Noelle King: New York State recently became the sixth U.S. state to legalize a new method of burial, prompting Governor Kathy Hochul to weigh in. I have to admit, when I first heard about it, I go, oh my God, this is weird. But when you think more about it, it's not weird. And in fact, it's a very good choice. And I think will become the choice for families over time. Forget the cemeteries and the crematoriums. Now New Yorkers can choose a greener option and have their bodies composted. Human composting. Some people are very into it. Oh, yeah. I mean, the environment is probably one of the most important things like me as a young person can care about today. Others are not so sold. I can just think of my dad's compost pile when I was younger. It was in a big tumbler and then all the stuff went into it. It cranked it around. So coming up on Today Explained, soiling yourself.

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Noelle King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Eleanor Cummins is a freelance science journalist who writes about what I recently learned is called death care and about the funeral industry. She has spent time reporting on this relatively new and quite compelling process called natural organic reduction, better known as human composting.

Eleanor Cummins: There is just really this profound interest in not feeling like your last act on Earth is a negative one. We talk so much, right, about like our carbon footprints while we're alive, about the way that we consume products, the cost, you know, to the environment of our travel. And so the idea that your final act might be one where if you were chosen to be cremated, you might emit as much as 450 pounds of carbon in that process alone. Something like human composting offers something that feels more peaceful, more natural, and ultimately more beneficial to the world that you're leaving behind. And I think people want that sort of feeling of legacy and of positivity when they're thinking about something that is difficult but inevitable in death.

Eleanor Cummins: How does it work? Walk me through the process. So the process starts with the body itself. If you are a composter, you might know that there's the greens and the browns. So the body is going to be sort of the greens here. It's that live, rich material that you're going to be able to transform. And you start with that body and you place it in one of these NOR chambers that a number of companies have developed. The body is then added to a bed of browns. So a lot of companies use things like alfalfa, straw, and sawdust. That body is then going to spend about a month in that material. and the vessel itself is going to be pumped full of oxygen. And what that allows is for the microbes that live inside our stomach and while we're alive are digesting our food to begin digesting the body. And those microbes go through a process called aerobic digestion, which is fed by this oxygen. So over time in this chamber, that material of compost is going to start heating up. The microbial process will accelerate and the body will be slowly reduced so that after a month, what you're really left with is a sort of stained soil that has a little bit of these residues of various chemicals and materials in our body. And that process is sort of the first step. So then once that material is created, you can take it and you can move it into a composting bin where it will be rotated and slowly cooled until you get that soil material. So in that way, it's a lot like garden composting. The only difference being that a human body has a lot of bones, which you wouldn't find in your average zucchini. And so those require a special process where you have to remove the bones. And companies, they will essentially grind them in a way similar to what you'd see in cremation. And then those pieces can be reintroduced into this composting process so that eventually they too become part of the soil. But otherwise, I would say, yeah, a backyard composter has a pretty good grip on this process.

Eleanor Cummins: So the family who decides to compost their loved one or whose loved one decided they wanted to be composted, at the end, what do they get? Like a bag of dirt? So what they're going to get is several hundred pounds of dirt. Oh. Yes. It can fill the back of a flatbed truck. And so that can be used however they want. They can put it in their own gardens. I know people who are raising roses with these materials. They can be donated to conservation zones so that they might be used in forests. The opportunities are really limitless because the soil product is very safe to use. It is sort of free of pathogens and as reliable as really any compost you'd be buying at Home Depot.

Noelle King: Now, as someone who spent two summers during the pandemic composting myself, I admit to being intrigued by the idea of composting myself. And so I called someone to ask what it's like being the loved one or the family member in this scenario. So my name is Marie Eaton. I live in Bellingham, Washington. And my brother, Wayne Dodge, suffered a catastrophic fall. And after five months of trying to recover from that fall, he died. And my brother and I were very very close And we talked about a lot of things including our choices at the end of life And Wayne was a very avid gardener like me and so this seemed like a wonderful way to just turn your body back into soil to go back to nourish the earth For me, it doesn't feel weird. It feels sacred that I am a living body. And for me to go back to nourish the land and the earth that has given me so much joy and so much delight and has nourished me for my 76 years, that feels like a sacred act to me, not weird.

Eleanor Cummins: Where did this idea come from? So about 10 years ago, a woman named Katrina Spade was pursuing an architecture degree. And she was thinking, you know, for her thesis, what if we found a better way to bury the dead? And I set out on a plan to redesign death care. Could I create a system that was beneficial to the earth, that used nature as a guide rather than something to be feared? So eventually Katrina founded Recompose, which is a Seattle-based human composting company, and she now offers the service.

Marie Eaton: Wayne died and we called the Recompose facility very much like you would any funeral home, and they came and got his body. I would say that Recompose did a beautiful job of making this a sacred act. So they offer an opportunity for the family to gather. and we were able to send biomass our own flowers to be layered over Wayne's body. And we had a chance to sing some songs and say poems and witness his entry into the cylinder. So this felt very natural and very wonderful, frankly. Because my brother was such a gardener, we chose to take the whole truckload. And then we took the truck to my brother's home, and he collected Japanese maple trees. So he had about 50 of them in his backyard, some of them large and planted in the ground, but many, many of them, the smaller variety is planted in pots. Part of what we decided as a family was to invite people to come and get some soil, and if they chose to also take a tree, that they could then use that soil to plant the tree in some place to remember Wayne. Friends came and we cried together and they took soil away. I also have quite a few Japanese maple trees and I took one of Wayne's trees to plant in memory of him. So he's out there in my front yard and when I go out and garden, you know, he's right under the tree. And I go out and talk to him. when I'm gardening, say, hey, buddy, you know, I miss you. I do. I miss him terribly.

Noelle King: Eleanor Cummins, science journalist, you're in New York State, and New York State legalized human composting on the last day of 2022. Is it a big win that this large and often leading state, New York, came around and said, okay, you can do this.

Eleanor Cummins: I think that because New York State's funeral industry is so traditional, it was a real sign of change. So far, this process has been fairly limited to, you know, the left coast. California is not the first state to be doing this. Washington, Colorado, Oregon, and Vermont now allow human composting. So a very kind of earthy, crunchy sort of movement where we're seeing a lot of change in the funeral industry overall. I think being able to pass this through New York State, which is, you know, a very Catholic, very traditional, you know, influenced funeral industry, was a marker of sort of the potential here. And I think it's going to continue to give sort of momentum to this movement of like, okay, maybe we could do this anywhere and everywhere.

Noelle King: Financially, that entire process is going to cost, at this point, somewhere between $5,500 and $7,000. How does that compare to me being buried or to me being cremated?

Eleanor Cummins: Burial in the United States is about $10,000. It's fairly expensive and something that a lot of people are sort of unprepared for the cost of. And that doesn't even include the burial land. Cremation, if you're doing direct cremation and you don't want any fuss about it, you want to just be cremated and returned, you know, some ashes and a pine box. That could potentially be done for less than $1,000, but it's often much more, especially if you want a funeral ceremony, an urn, and things like that.

Noelle King: How many people are doing this nowadays? It's funny. It has, you know, so much momentum behind it, but there are probably only a few hundred people who have completed this process so far.

Eleanor Cummins: Wow. But it's still a fairly small group. Still a small group, but growing. Why do you think it's growing now?

Eleanor Cummins: I think that there is a feeling that has been growing for a long time now, that the funeral industry went more than a century without change. We've seen everything else, you know, quote unquote, disrupted. Why not death care?

Noelle King: Does anyone oppose this?

Eleanor Cummins: There is definitely opposition. It is scattered, but we have seen a lot of Catholic dioceses at a local level who have sort of articulated opposition to this, saying that it's disrespectful to human remains. The New York State Catholic Conference saying in a statement in part, a process whereby human remains are composted and scattered in a designated scattering garden or area in a cemetery fails to sufficiently respect the dignity due the deceased.

Noelle King: I think, too, that there are a lot of people who just wouldn't ever show up at a community board meeting and say, like, stop the human composting, but who feel sort of squeamish about it. I don't think I like that. I think I like the other two options. I don't know. I don't think I would feel comfortable with that.

Eleanor Cummins: Is that a joke, actually?

Noelle King: No, no. It's a real bill. The governor signed it into law. Yeah, whatever. Whatever anybody wants to do, but I'm just going to be cremated.

Eleanor Cummins: I think that it is something that is really hard to articulate any really fervent line against, because the argument is always going to come back of, well, what is more natural than this?

Noelle King: I would rather be composted. Return to the earth. Make some use of this body.

Eleanor Cummins: It's Today Explained. We're back this time with Tanya Marsh. She's a professor at Wake Forest University School of Law, where she teaches funeral and cemetery law.

Tanya Marsh: Composting is just letting the body decompose naturally. That's not new, is it?

Noelle King: No, absolutely. That's what humans have been doing for most of human history. We've simply let remains decompose either in the ground or on the ground. We're not inventing some radical new way of disposing of human remains. We're just basically going back to basics.

Tanya Marsh: The prevailing norm in the United States for the 20th century was embalming, open casket viewing of the body, a casketed burial in a vault or a grave liner. That really started with all of those component parts in the late 1800s. And embalming started to catch on, but I'd say it was really the period between World War I and World War II, and certainly by World War II, that that became the norm for disposition in the United States.

Noelle King: Prior to that, would it have just been you go in the ground?

Tanya Marsh: You know, as long as we've had cities, there have been differences between disposition methods in more densely populated areas because people didn't have space and they didn't have as ready access to land. And so it would be more common earlier in U.S. history to have employed an outside person to help with preparing the body for disposition and maybe even transporting the body to the cemetery. In rural areas, families tended to do it all themselves.

Noelle King: Although we had undertakers before we had funeral directors, undertakers typically made caskets and they provided transportation to the cemeteries. And in a lot of small towns, they also sold furniture.

Tanya Marsh: Oh, that's so interesting. And actually, it makes complete sense.

Noelle King: Now, in 2023, I would say I know a fair number of people who have been cremated or who would like to be cremated. When did that become more popular?

Tanya Marsh: Yeah, so the rising popularity of cremation has been absolutely phenomenal. So it was legalized in the United States starting in the late 1800s. But in 1980, we were still right on the verge of double digits, right from upper 9% to 10%. But in 2021, which is the most recent number for which we have statistics, the cremation rate was 57.5%. percent. So between 1980 and 2021, it went from 10 percent to almost 60 percent. That's just a meteoric rise in a very short period of time.

Noelle King: Why? Why did that happen?

Tanya Marsh: First of all, cost. Cremation can be much less expensive than the full casketed funeral and burial. Second is really flexibility. So if I'm going to put a body in a grave, I have to pick a cemetery and I have to make that decision very quickly around the time of death. But if body's going to be cremated, I can decide later how I want those remains to be divided among family members or scattered in different meaningful places. And I think the final reason is we have a much more mobile society. And so with a diminished connection to a particular place, then do you want to leave your body in a cemetery where nobody's ever going to visit? Or do you rather have your remains scattered in places that were meaningful to you.

Noelle King: Tanya, our show today is about human composting. I wonder are there other practices that are growing in popularity that you think are interesting

Tanya Marsh: Yeah so NOR or natural organic reduction is definitely the one that has risen in popularity the most quickly and in recent years The other one that's really emerging is called alkaline hydrolysis, or water cremation. It's basically a way of reducing the human body to a substance that's similar to cremated remains, but it's in a process that involves water and a base solution. And so it is perceived as more environmentally friendly than cremation. It consumes less energy, for example. It costs about the same. It's been legalized in about half the states, but hasn't really taken off in terms of popularity. And we don't have great numbers for it, but it's not crowding out cremation by any sense.

Noelle King: I was surprised to see New York State had legalized human composting because I guess as an American, I always think we can do whatever we want, right? But no, this did have to be made legal.

Tanya Marsh: Right. So this is all state law. It's not federal law. And so each state defines by statute which methods of disposition are legal in that state. So back in the late 1800s, they had to go state by state to get cremation legalized. And now they're having to go state by state to get NOR and alkaline hydrolysis legalized.

Noelle King: So the states regulate the methods of disposition, and then they also regulate who can practice funeral service. So that's another, you know, by restricting the group of folks who can practice in this area, that's another way of sort of limiting innovation.

Tanya Marsh: Funeral homes and cemeteries are adapting in different ways. You're going to see a lot of small funeral homes closing, especially in more rural areas because the economics just don't fundamentally work. You're seeing more consolidation, more economies of scale in more urban areas. You have a couple national publicly traded companies in this area. You also have some privately held aggregators that own a number of funeral homes. They can compete better even with falling margins as people spend less on funerals as they're choosing less expensive alternatives.

Noelle King: Cemeteries were all built at a time when you had nearly 100% of deaths resulting in burial. And now we've got about 40% of deaths resulting in burial. Those economics are fundamentally skewed, right? So you're going to see a lot of abandoned cemeteries and cemeteries having to, you know, put up cell phone towers or, you know, invite people in for using it as green space or becoming members, friends of the cemetery. And for some cemeteries in urban areas, that'll work. and for some cemeteries, it just won't.

Tanya Marsh: Okay, so when a cemetery goes bankrupt, it's either go to the public or find some way of getting money or just cease to exist. Right, but unlike other types of real estate, a cemetery can't be redeveloped, right? It's not a shopping mall that can be torn down, right? So for most abandoned cemeteries, the folks who are running it or owned it, they just walk away. And then it's either left to get overgrown and become a nuisance for the area or the state is going to come in and take over maintenance obligations.

Noelle King: We haven't really had a conversation that I think we need to have with the states that they're going to start needing to think about how they need to step up and provide some financing to take care of some of these cemeteries so that, you know, this is a big land use in the United States. There's a lot of cemeteries. And for the health of our communities, we need that space to be taken care of.

Tanya Marsh: I'm from a rural area, and all of what you're saying tracks from me for rural cemeteries. I feel like every once or twice a year, I come across a story about a cemetery in a big city that is just too full. What are the options there? Is it to somehow pack more people in or say, look, this cemetery is closed?

Tanya Marsh: Oh, sure. We have a lot of closed cemeteries. There are cities in this country where you're not legally allowed to bury another body. So definitely in urban areas, that's been true. In fact, New York City started closing down cemeteries in the early 1800s. Wow. So we have a long history of that.

Noelle King: So that's definitely an option on the table. But most of the large urban cemeteries that are still open are trying to find less land-intensive ways of disposing of bodies, right? So maybe we don't have room for single graves anymore, but could you stack graves? Could you build a multi-story mausoleum or columbarium? Could you create scattering gardens? And then I know there's some urban cemeteries that are really interested in grave recycling. which is something that's routinely practiced in Europe, and we just don't have much of a tradition up here.

Tanya Marsh: So you might rent a grave for 50 or 75 years, and then when your lease is up, whatever is left is going to be put in a communal part of the cemetery, and then that grave can be released to someone else.

Noelle King: When I first heard about this idea, there seemed to be something a bit spooky about it. But actually, it makes perfect sense. After all, we can't keep expanding our cities forever. And actually, it's quite reassuring to think that once we're dead, we're not going to be using up valuable land, but sharing graves already in use with new friends.

Tanya Marsh: Industry professionals are asking me, you know, conservative, entrenched, traditional cemeterians are asking me, what are the chances we can get grave recycling legalized? I think there's a lot of interest there. So I do think we're going to see grave recycling within the next 10 years.

Noelle King: It's just really exciting. This is the most fundamental change in death care and disposition practices in a thousand years.

Tanya Marsh: I think that we're entering an era where a lot of funeral directors are in their 60s. They're going to retire. They're not going to be replaced by members of their family. You've got consumers demanding a lot of change. So I think it's sort of like, you know, the laws are an immovable object and changing consumer demand is an irresistible force. So I think we are going to see a lot of messy change in the next 10 years. I mean, it's just a fascinating time to be interested in this area.

Noelle King: That was Tanya Marsh. She's the author of The Law of Human Remains. Today's episode was produced by Avishai Artsy. It was edited by Matthew Collette and engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey. It was fact-checked by Laura Buller. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.